Windows System Timer Tool - a fix for stutter in games?

After several months in storage, I finally had a chance to dig out and re-build my Zotac Zbox gaming machine. Once it was up and running, I was dismayed to see quite an abundance of stuttering in games. I swapped out physical hardware and related drivers and even went between operating systems - nothing helped.

Then yesterday I stumbled upon a post where someone said they solved this problem by using a program called Windows System Timer Tool to, well, adjust the Windows system timer. It's a standalone program where you set the timer to less than or equal to your display's response time. In the case of my Acer monitor, that's 4 ms, but you can adjust it to as low as 0.5 ms. For some reason, even though I set the command line argument correctly (I'm pretty sure at least), the program seems to boot at 1 ms. Regardless, and while I need to run a few more tests, it seems that this little utility has fixed everything. One particular sore spot was the Dreamcast emulator DEmul. Games would run, but the hiccuping was so bad that they would be unplayable. This is no longer the case - any problems I'm seeing now are most likely the result of the emulation itself.

Anyway, just wanted to post my findings in case anyone else is pulling their hair out with this problem.

 

I've attached a .zip file containing a .bat file for TimerTool. Make sure to edit it so the path to the executable file is correct, and change the 0.5 entry to whatever your monitor's response rate is. Then drop the .bat into your startup folder, and you're on your way. For Windows 10, open the Run dialog box, type "shell:startup" (without the quotes) and drop the file there.

 

Setting things to 1ms can also be done with Throttlestop. It was one of the main reasons I used throttlestop, prior to my timer resolution magically getting locked to 1ms for no reason.