New Ryzen system and some games are unplayable

Greetings,

so I’ve built a new system around ryzen 5 1600X and Win10. (details in the end)
After I’ve installed the first few games I’ve encountered a problem:
Some games are completely unplayable due to extreme stutter from start up, that’s never ending (about 0.25FPS).

Not all games do this. Mostly small indie games are fine. But (in my example) XCOM2 and Eador were completely unplayable.
The absurd thing is, that when I tab out to desktop or another window, the game is running completely fine in the background. But in the game itself, it goes mad again and interestingly the GPU goes to 0%.
My last system - Phenom X2 with Win7 had no problems like that at all.

My workaround to solve it is starting games in borderless window. After that, every game is running fine and everything works as it should. So the problem is indeed starting games in Fullscreen.

I’m not sure where the problem lies. I’ve installed up to date drivers for graphics card. But it didn’t help.
I’m assuming it has to do something with drivers. But not sure which ones…

Any ideas?

My specs:
OS: Win10
CPU: Ryzen 5 1600X
GPU: Radeon R9 380
MoBo: MSI X370 Gaming Pro
RAM: G.Skill 16GB DDR4-3200

Have you installed chipset drivers for your motherboard? It’s needed, it also gives you a “ryzen ballanced profile” instead of the Windows default for power management.

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Yes I did install the AMD chipset drivers.
I think they are included in the complete package for gpu drivers as well, since I’m using one from Ati.

No, motherboard chipset drivers are a separate file from GPU drivers. I’m using a Ryzen APU, and was told I should install chipset drivers for my motherboard first, then follow that by APU drivers… I assume that’s because they aren’t included?

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Herenis a link to the relevant download section on AMDs website.

https://support.amd.com/en-us/download/chipset?os=Windows%2010%20-%2064

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I second @PloniAlmoni theory of missing drivers. Go to the device manager and look for yellow triangles.

Be careful when installing Ryzen chipset drivers after your GPU drivers. It will claim that is already installed even though it isn’t and sometimes it seems to mess up the version(s) shown.

Also, use the High Performance powerplan (or _Ryzen Balanced) when gaming. Everything else does something weird to the PCIe slots which leads to stuttering.

Strange, I was sure I’ve installed the AMD chipset drivers yesterday.
To be sure I downloaded the drivers from the MSI website and now I see the ryzen optimized power plan and so far the stuttering problem is gone. But I have to test it a bit more, to be sure.

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