Well god damn, that fixed it. What an odd issue.

Thanks a ton.

I have only the discrete GPU - no integrated GPU or anything. Wouldn’t any process with a GUI need to utilize the GPU?

I’ll give the discord a try

Is that not normal?

But that’s the thing - it’s been a persistent issue over the past 4 drivers. Just a permanent stutter no matter what I’m doing.

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 570.124.04             Driver Version: 570.124.04     CUDA Version: 12.8     |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti     Off |   00000000:07:00.0  On |                  N/A |
|  0%   59C    P0            116W /  350W |    1160MiB /  12288MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
                                                                                         
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU   GI   CI              PID   Type   Process name                        GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A            2966      G   /usr/bin/kwalletd6                        3MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A            3065      G   /usr/bin/kwin_wayland                    55MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A            3180      G   /usr/bin/maliit-keyboard                102MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A            3198      G   /usr/bin/Xwayland                         4MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A            3303      G   /usr/bin/ksmserver                        3MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A            3309      G   /usr/bin/kded6                            3MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A            3353      G   /usr/bin/plasmashell                    198MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A            3438      G   /usr/bin/kaccess                          3MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A            3439      G   ...it-kde-authentication-agent-1          3MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A            3441      G   ...ibexec/xdg-desktop-portal-kde          3MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A            3637      G   /usr/bin/kdeconnectd                      3MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A            4108      G   /usr/bin/xwaylandvideobridge              3MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A            4158      G   /usr/libexec/DiscoverNotifier             3MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A            4292      G   keepassxc                                 3MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A            4515    C+G   /usr/bin/sunshine                       253MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A            5924      G   /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox              172MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A           56842      G   /usr/bin/konsole                          3MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Does it happen with all games or GL engagement, or just the heavier ones?

It’s just constant - the video I provided shows the UFO test. The stuttering is on the desktop.

What’s your memory util?

I don’t know what that is

Does your machine use swap when gaming?

No, 32 GB RAM. I rarely go above 40%.

Are you overclocking your memory or CPU freq?

No, using XMP settings