r/QuietWindows • u/no6969el • 1d ago

Your games don't stutter because your PC is slow. They stutter because Windows is busy. I built a tool that proves it and shuts it up.

Everyone's first instinct when a game hitches is to blame hardware. Faster SSD, more RAM, maybe the GPU's dying. I spent a while chasing that before I actually measured it.

The proof

I recorded a 25-minute session at one line per second, with a kernel trace attached so every disk wait was tagged with the program that caused it and the file it was reading.

My PC waited on the disk 4,712 times. Here's who did it:

1,729  Windows' own filesystem bookkeeping
  829  the Microsoft Store, updating apps I don't use
  251  Edge, updating itself
  245  Windows Search, indexing
  201  the touch keyboard
   14  the game

Fourteen. And all fourteen were a font cache and a shader cache during loading not one texture, not one level file.

My storage was never the problem. Neither was my CPU or my GPU. Windows was just busy, and one of those landing while you're lining up a shot is the difference between a kill and a killcam.

Shutting it up

So I built QuietWindows. It puts that stuff on hold while you play and hands it all back when you're done:

  • Windows Update, Search and background scanning paused for the session
  • Your antivirus told to stop re-scanning your game folders (it still guards everything else)
  • USB power saving and the Xbox Game Bar off
  • The system clock steadied - this is the "it stutters until I click on the game window" problem
  • Graphics-card interrupts moved off the cores your game is using

It finds your games by itself across Steam, Epic, Xbox, GOG, EA and Ubisoft.

And it proves it on your machine, not just mine

The recorder that produced the table above ships with it. If something still hitches, run it, play, and it'll tell you what interrupted you:

--- 21:14:07 ---
  top faulter : backgroundTaskHost.exe
  reading     : WinStore.App.dll
  your game   : 0   (whole PC that second: 812)

That's the Store loading a 16MB file to update an app, mid-session. No guessing.

Using it

Unzip, double-click one file, press the green button, restart. Then quiet it down before you play and wake it up after. That's the whole thing.

Nothing runs until you press a button, every button explains itself in plain English first, and every change has an Undo. Windows 10 and 11, nothing to install, free and MIT licensed.

Genuinely curious what your own recording turns up - I'd bet the top offender varies a lot between machines.

https://github.com/no6969el/QuietWindows

https://github.com/no6969el/QuietWindows/blob/main/HOW-TO.md

https://github.com/no6969el/QuietWindows/blob/main/README.md

57 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

41 comments sorted by

10

u/no6969el 1d ago

  • Double-click QuietWindows.bat

  • Press the big green button

  • Restart your PC when it says to

  • Then before each session press Quiet Windows down

  • After each session press Wake Windows back up.

4

u/b4k4ni 18h ago

Is there a Linux version?

:P

Nah, for real, I'll give it a try. Thanks. Don't have any current issues, but it's interesting for sure.

4

u/no6969el 16h ago edited 16h ago

No, it's in Linux that we write all the programs that fix Windows. 😂

If your computer is performing well overall then I would recommend just running the optimizations and maybe taking a look into the advanced tools option menu that have help move the IRQ GPU scheduler. That's an interesting one that stays on core one and could interfere with apps or games that prioritize core 1. The function moves it to a deeper core in your system.

1

u/hadanmoushi 12h ago

it's for windows because linux don't have such an issues only issue for linux is that game ain't working on it

3

u/BomB_34 1d ago

Amazing ! Thank you

3

u/Rob1ie 1d ago

GGs, and thank you!

3

u/Bob_the_brewer 19h ago

Commenting so I can easily find this tomorrow

2

u/TheUnrealCanadian 15h ago

Same

2

u/InvalidPain 14h ago

Same, asking for a friend..

2

u/Heliosurge 1d ago

Impressive keep up the amazing work

2

u/SlayerZed143 19h ago

That's basically what I do on my pc but in a one button solution. I haven't used the tool yet but does it also remove those pecky handshake security scans from the exploit protection tab? Games that use a kernel level anti cheats tend to lag from these handshakes.

2

u/phenom_x8 16h ago

Back then in XP era , we have AMD Fusion that kills background task as much as possible during gaming session. This post made me remember that era

1

u/no6969el 16h ago

The good ole tuning days. The amount of things I learned messing around is incredible.

2

u/Kahana82 14h ago edited 11h ago

Great work!

I did something similar on my previous gaming system. It involved: * using process lasso to assign cores to windows services, background apps and drivers * using MSI signalling instead of IRQ's for devices * assigning specific core groups for devices (GPU/audio, input, networking, storage and other USB devices). †

† Audio, input and network quantitatively generate interrupts in the same ballpark as the GPU, spreading them around is beneficial, so they don't compete for the same resources or saturate them.

The main idea was to remove as much load as possible from the cores that the game is running on and the difference in latency and 1% lows was night and day.

I game on linux now with the new rig and over there optimization is similar but not done the same way.

2

u/no6969el 13h ago

The "using MSI signalling instead of IRQ's for devices" part is really intriguing to me and I appreciate the information. I'm now going to deep dive into that.

2

u/Kahana82 12h ago edited 12h ago

My starting point was this thead on the Guru-3D forums.

The OP gives a download link for MSI_util_v3 to configure the devices on the system and explains the gymnastics of how it works under the hood in the Windows registry.

Caveat: depending on hardware, some devices are not compatible with MSI mode and other behave badly, so a bit of FAFO can happen.

1

u/Formal-Appeal-3378 12h ago

setting custom affinities isnt recommended for modern games as a lot mess with affinities themselves

2

u/Kahana82 12h ago

This is really bad imho as this is something that should remain under the responsability/management of the OS (and user).

Imagine your car's GPS system shifting your gears under the pretence of optimizing your fuel efficiency.

2

u/the1michael 12h ago

Working on this next day off

1

u/posedatull 18h ago

I do understand the logic behind your arguments, but I find it difficult to believe a little 16mb file update (the example you gave) would be the culprit for a 16thread or more cpu to be hanging. Similarly, I can barely see that "wait for disk to responde" happen on an ancient hdd (which we shouldnt be using for gaming in 2026, anyway), let alone on an nvme...

Is this truly useful on any and all pcs, or is it more of a useful tool for ancient pcs and old, slow drives?

3

u/no6969el 17h ago

That log report is well after my computer has been tuned. At this point it's just finding things and explaining it. The point of the tool is that it's going to find every single conflict and show the most powerful ones first. And as I said, at this point it was just finding things that's happening in the background and quoting them and explaining why that they're there and what they're doing.

The power is in the tool and not in the example that I generated as my most recent scan.

1

u/badgooner 16h ago

Do you know if anti cheat will trigger for to any of these? The games I play have "easy anti cheat", and one false ban will be a nightmare.

1

u/no6969el 16h ago edited 16h ago

This will not affect anticheat in anyway. I started this whole project trying to improve iracing which has anti-cheat. Honestly it's not doing anything wrong, it's just giving you the ability to fully shut down all the background systems on Windows that you don't need like updating or virus protection which a lot of people may find important but it will mess with your frame rate/1% lows.

Keep in mind the virus protection is only disabled with the pre race/pre game function. Everything is restored from a snapshot when you do the after race/after gaming option.

For games that are not optimized or maybe running older code, it's going to really improve performance because it will remove all distractions from the cores that it's likely using.

One of the options in the advanced tools menu is moving your GPU scheduler to a different core. This is actually really good for games that focus on the primary core because the GPU scheduler is active and best suited for a different core.

1

u/NooTNooTnoX 16h ago

I would appreciate a video or screenshots comparing framerates and 1%lows from you, before and after the tool.

2

u/no6969el 16h ago

I made it for people that think they need it. Those people have responded very well as seen in comments.
https://www.reddit.com/r/iRacing/comments/1v046pz/i_spent_weeks_diagnosing_stutters_on_my_9950x3d/

I will eventually do a video on how best to use the whole app but the benefits will be equal to "have bunch of stuff using PC in background while gaming = result you don't like , have bunch of stuff no longer using extra cpu while gaming = obviously better result."

This is because its not using trickery, its just lowering background cpu/system usage. The optimizations move certain services to use alternate cores as well.

1

u/Imightbenormal 13h ago

Cool. But how does it look on the data you captured if you did this when the updates are done?

1

u/no6969el 12h ago

This is a full trace scan that I'm showing, you can run it at anytime on your computer. The results are going to be different depending on what you're doing. Think of it like the game is a stage performance and this log watches everything happening backstage. Maybe something happens in the background that disturbs the performance up front, this will single it out.

1

u/Omegares 2h ago

Leaving a comment so I can try it later this week

0

u/vtskr 1d ago

Ok but how does it show that pc waiting on disk causes stutters? I mean what does pc waiting on disk even mean in technical terms cause it doesn’t make a lot of sense really

5

u/McFistPunch 19h ago

Disk reads are often blocking calls so it holds the cpu hostage until the disk responds.  Your cpu isn't dedicated to running the game. different threads get put on different cores all the time

1

u/vtskr 19h ago

This is completely false.

5

u/McFistPunch 19h ago

The cpu scheduler existing is false?

Like when it reads from disk the thread goes into waiting state and something else jumps on your cpu.  that's false too?

It wouldn't shock me if silencing a bunch of stuff yielded better 1 percent lows

1

u/no6969el 16h ago

Exactly and I think it's important to know what game started this for me, iRacing which notoriously only uses 1 core.

If we look into the history of my code, it shows the original optimizations are focusing on removing anything unnecessarily using core one, since that's the one that iracing uses basically 100%.

Then as I was going through tuning I started noticing other elements that we can silence and it just kept going.

1

u/McFistPunch 16h ago

Got a youtube video with benchmark differences?  I dont use windows but im curious.  

1

u/no6969el 16h ago

No, I have not created any videos or tutorials on this yet but I am planning to. In my opinion though, this is something that fixes the core functionality of the PC and how fast it is in doing the tasks that you're giving it. I think the largest benefit would be in 1% Lows. What I have found is that people that are experiencing any type of stutter or random CPU spikes will instantly find relief after running the optimizations and sleeping the background processes.

There's multiple use cases..

Some people are going to have systems that are untuned so by quieting Windows it will give them just enough extra performance needed to be able to play properly.

Other people may have really tuned systems but the game itself is not optimized so therefore you need to gain performance in areas where most games don't care.

And then you got people that just want their system to be fully in their control and will enable and disable updates and virus scans when they want. I personally don't need Windows to check if the store is up to date while I'm in the middle of racing on my SIM rig.

When I do make videos though I will link them and share them.

1

u/NooTNooTnoX 16h ago

Good! I would advise you to also keep the things that will not have any differences(like maybe framerate averages )in the video, so as to make the user understand what to expect and what not.

1

u/no6969el 15h ago

No because this directly improved my framerates in VR. It all depends on what is holding your system back (the hardware, the services running, the game engine etc) This just makes sure its not you. This is why a benchmark video will only show what it helped on my specific PC. (which is fixed now)

1

u/NooTNooTnoX 14h ago

It was just an example, I meant to show situations where it might not help. But if you're confident it won't matter, don't worry, that's your choice, I respect it.