[Workaround] Preventing microstuttering when using MSI Afterburner and Fan Control

[Robot1me]

Hi dear community, I like to share a workaround about an issue where using both MSI Afterburner and Fan Control causes systemwide microstutters. I'm also creating this discussion since search engines prioritize community content nowadays, so hopefully this should reach affected people more easily. I also like to apologize if this has been discussed before, but I couldn't find any similar threads.

Before I describe the workaround, here are details about the issue: If you use Fan Control and then you start MSI Afterburner, doing so causes 3D applications to be affected by irregular microstuttering. These manifest themselves as framedrops from 60 to 59 or 59.5 and tend to occur every few seconds. This can happen in games, as well as Windows itself. An easy quick test to check if you are affected is to drag a window of Windows' notepad around. If dragging the window hitches a few times while dragging it in circular motions, you may be affected, because it should be perfectly fluid. In the beginning I was thinking this may be normal, but turns out it's definitely not. There are other instances where people discovered that MSI Afterburner can introduce microstutters like that, though while it's equally as annoying, these are separate issues because it's not related to interference with fan controls.

What I believe the cause of the issue to be: When you start MSI Afterburner, it will attempt to set its own fan setting. Even if you have it set to "auto", I noticed that MSI Afterburner still tries to apply this default setting. If you have Fan Control already open and it's in charge of controlling your GPU fans, this creates a conflict where MSI Afterburner appears to keep trying, leading to systemwide microstutters. Interestingly, that stuttering persists even if you close Fan Control, and only stops until you restart MSI Afterburner or close it.

The workaround: If you want to use MSI Afterburner, you have to let it autostart with the system and before Fan Control starts. Otherwise, starting MSI Afterburner by hand and after Fan Control has already launched will cause the microstuttering. In the settings window of MSI Afterburner, you only need to tick these two checkboxes:

Afterwards, open Fan Control and make sure you have an autostart delay enabled. The default value for this should be 15 seconds, but 10 seconds is safe too.

That is it!

Further details: If you wonder how the stuttering manifests itself in the overlay of Afterburner's RivaTuner, it does look like this:

Once I applied this workaround, frametimes are finally stable again:

Hopefully this helps other people who are - knowingly or unknowingly - affected by this issue!