Apex Legends stuttering 5 minutes after launch
When I first installed Apex legends on my freshly built machine, which is dual boot with 2 Windows 11 Pro operating systems, the game ran perfectly. I played for several hours, no issues, and proceeded to shut down the computer when done.
The following day after booting up, the game started to stutter (game, audio and wider pc in general) after 5 minutes of gameplay. It is always around the 5 minute mark that the stuttering starts. The stutters are spread randomly by a few seconds and very bad, lasting anywhere from a few milliseconds to half a second.
I tried ALL the recommended tweaks, reinstalls, driver updates, windows settings changes, BIOS changes... EVERYTHING. I've exhausted every last suggestion Google has to offer.
Surprisingly, installing it on my OTHER windows 11 pro operating system (different nvme drive) worked, right up until I rebooted it. Same problem. Game is fine until Windows 11 restarts, and then the OS is somehow 'infected' with something from the restart that I cannot get rid of by uninstalling/reinstalling the game, steam, Easy Anti Cheat, or anything.
My system is high end, AMD 9800X3D, RTX 4080, Aorus X870 Elite Wifi7 Mainboard, 32gb RAM. There is no heavy load on the CPU or GPU when the stuttering starts and the temperatures on both are fine.
The problem is restricted to Apex Legends only as far as I can tell, and I suspect it has something to do with EAC or some service/thing that does something at system startup.
No other games give me the same grief (as far as I can tell). The issue seems to Apex only, and it works just fine right up until I reboot and is stuffed from there on out.
Hoping someone can give me a further clue or has seen this before and knows what's going on.
Fix for stuttering on desktop/laptop after 24/07/2025 update
If your laptop or desktop use realtek lan drivers from manufacturer or you have newer one you will get micro stutter after 3-4 minutes in game. This is caused by EAC scanning realtek lan driver and causing high cpu usage. Everytime you get a stutter you can observe event viewer spammed with errors: event id 2 (rt26cx21 cannot be found). Reinstalling driver doesnt not help. Only solution is to remove realtek lan drivers and let windows install generic ones and your stutter will be gone.
Also if you run motherboard with tb4 make sure to select power options for usb to disbale
https://rog-forum.asus.com/t5/amd-600-series/x670e-usb4-and-easyanticheat-cause-stuttering/td-p/980441
