Why does Returnal stutter on the Gigabyte RTX 5060 Ti 16G?
During intense combat with particles flying everywhere, my frame times would suddenly jump from 8ms to 35ms, which is absolutely lethal in a fast-paced shooter. The Gigabyte RTX 5060 Ti 16G core clock was bouncing between 2.4GHz - 2.6GHz, but I noticed the memory controller had a 3-5ms addressing delay when handling 4K texture streams. I initially tried enabling 'Prefer Maximum Performance' in the NVIDIA Control Panel, but that only gained me about 4 FPS while the micro-stutters persisted—a totally useless effort. I eventually went back into the NVIDIA Control Panel, manually set the Shader Cache Size to 10GB, and locked the core voltage offset at +15mV. Monitoring via RTSS showed the frame time curve finally settling into a steady 7-11ms range. Interestingly, the GPU hit 72℃ right after the voltage tweak, so I had to optimize the fan curve to bring it back down to 64-68℃. Power draw stayed around 160-175W with fans at 1600RPM. I saved this profile, and now the frame generation is rock steady at 7-11ms.
