Micro-stuttering, Freezing, and Input-lag on Great Gaming Computer. Now 4K@60

Stay with me for a minute and check out my gaming rig below:

• Asus X399-a
• AMD 1950x Threadripper
• 32Gbs of DDR4 RAM
• 480Gb Corsair NVMe PCIE SSD
• Asus Strix 1080 ti OC Edition

         I should not have any problems running Apex Legends 4K@60FPS right? That’s where you’d be wrong. I played for the first time a few nights ago with a friend who has played with no problems and hated it. The game stuttered, my shots always missed, people were not on a corner then I was dead – it was a terrible experience. So the first thing I did? Go through the normal steps of turning down graphics settings. I went all the way down to 1280x720 with no improvement. I fired up GeForce and took all of the settings to low/disabled that I could as well and that did nothing.

          I decided to make an evening of fixing this problem tonight and lone and behold I have cracked the code. After hours of codeword searching on Google, I found out that someone else playing Overwatch, whose Reddit account was deleted, was having a very similar issue on a Gigabyte motherboard. He said the fix to get his gaming running correctly was as simple as disabling something in BIOS and it worked flawlessly for him from then on. What was this mysterious BIOS setting? For him, it was called HPET.

High Precision Event Timer, also known as HPET, was causing his issue so I decided to check if it was causing mine as well. Many more hours of searching later, I found out that the Asus boards do not allow you to enable/disable HPET and there is no way to do this through the BIOS for this manufacturer. So I check out Google one more time and found someone say that you can just simply disable HPET through device manager and restart to disable it. I thought it surely could not be that easy but after going into the Device Manager and finding it under the System Devices, I was able to disable it. I then rebooted my PC and right away noticed that my mouse, a Roccat Leadr, was much more precise than usual. This made me want to really test it out right away so I cranked my settings all the way up to max and went into the training, where I was having problems before. IT WORKED! 4k@60FPS, no micro-stuttering, freezing, slow response times, the game looks and “feels” beautiful!

               I know it was long winded but I hope this helps other users out. I have yet to find a common link between people who have issues with this and people who do not, I can only speculate that most motherboards have this disabled in BIOS out of the box and most people do not mess with it.

Happy Gaming Everyone!

Steps: to Disable:

1. Press and hold the Windows logo key and R
2. Type in or copy/paste) “devmgmt.msc” without quotes and hit enter.
3. Click on your computer name to expand it, if it is not already.
4. Go to System Devices and expand it.
5. Right click on “High Precision Event Timer” and click Disable Device.
6. Reboot your computer and enjoy!

Reddit post of Deleted User:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/6nfvxf/easy_way_to_disable_hpet_to_raise_performance/