How to fix VRAM stuttering in The Last of Us Part I on an RTX 5090 D?
Walking through the overgrown forests, the frame rate just tanks out of nowhere, which is honestly insane for a 5090. The GamePP Hardware Sensor Page showed VRAM usage was only around 14 - 18GB, but the memory controller load was spiking between 20 - 45ms, creating a massive bottleneck. I tried enabling 'Prefer Maximum Performance' in the NVIDIA driver, but weirdly, the frequency of the drops actually increased, which made me really cautious about further tweaks. I then used the GamePP Resource Scheduler Panel to set the game's VRAM priority to Maximum and killed all background hardware-accelerated apps. The smoothness during scene transitions improved instantly, and the hitching was gone.
