Why Your 1% Lows Are Ruining Your Game (And How to Fix Them)

What are 1% lows, exactly?

When you see "average FPS" in a benchmark, that's the mean frame rate across the entire capture. It smooths everything out. A second where you're getting 240 FPS and a second where you drop to 60 FPS both contribute to that average — but only one of those seconds ruins your aim.

1% lows represent the bottom 1% of frames you rendered during the benchmark. If your average is 220 FPS but your 1% lows are 60 FPS, you're regularly experiencing drops to 60 FPS — roughly once every 100 frames. At 220 FPS that's several times per second. That's the jank you're feeling.

Some tools also show 0.1% lows — the absolute worst frames. These are the visible hitches, the moments where the game visibly freezes for a fraction of a second.

Why do bad 1% lows happen?

Unlike average FPS (which is mostly limited by your GPU), 1% lows are caused by instability — brief moments where something interrupts the smooth delivery of frames. The most common causes are:

1. RAM running at the wrong speed

This is the single most common cause of bad 1% lows on otherwise capable systems. Most motherboards default to running RAM at JEDEC speeds (2133 or 2400 MHz) regardless of what your sticks are rated for. If you bought 3600 MHz RAM but never enabled XMP/EXPO in your BIOS, you're running at 2133 MHz — and slower RAM means more CPU stalls, more frametime spikes, worse 1% lows.

Enabling XMP/EXPO takes about 60 seconds and is the highest-ROI single change you can make to improve 1% lows. It's in your BIOS under "AI Overclock Tuner", "D.O.C.P", or similar depending on your board.

2. CPU scheduling and background contention

Your CPU is juggling your game, Windows, background apps, overlays, and dozens of other processes simultaneously. When a background process needs CPU time at the same moment your game does, it causes a frametime spike — a momentary delay in frame delivery that shows up as a 1% low drop.

Common culprits: Windows Update running silently, Discord overlay, GeForce Experience, Xbox Game Bar, browser tabs with video, and antivirus scans. Disabling or closing these during gameplay (and setting proper process priority) can meaningfully improve 1% low consistency.

3. Thermal throttling

When your CPU or GPU gets too hot, it reduces its clock speed to protect itself. This throttling is dynamic — clocks drop, performance dips, clocks recover, performance comes back. This oscillation shows up as inconsistent frametimes and bad 1% lows even when your average FPS looks fine.

You can check for throttling in HWinfo64 — look for CPU "Thermal Throttling" or GPU clock drops that correlate with temperature spikes. If your CPU is regularly hitting 95°C+ under load, throttling is almost certainly impacting your 1% lows.

4. Mismatched frame cap and VRR strategy

How you cap your FPS (or whether you cap it at all) has a significant effect on frametime consistency. Running uncapped with G-Sync/FreeSync can cause frametime variance at the top of the VRR range. Running with no cap and no VRR causes tearing and latency spikes. The right strategy depends on your monitor, GPU, and the game — but having no strategy is almost always worse than having one.

5. VRAM overflow

If a game's assets exceed your GPU's VRAM capacity, it has to shuffle data in and out of system RAM. This causes severe frametime spikes — massive 1% low drops that feel like hitching. Easily diagnosed: check VRAM usage in MSI Afterburner overlay. If it's near or at 100%, lower texture settings.

How to measure your 1% lows

The best free tool for this is CapFrameX. It captures real in-game frametime data during an actual gameplay session — not a synthetic benchmark — and gives you average FPS, 1% lows, 0.1% lows, and a frametime graph that makes instability immediately visible.

To use it: install CapFrameX, start a capture in-game (default hotkey is F11), play for 60–90 seconds in a representative scenario, stop the capture, and view the analysis. The frametime graph will show you spikes instantly — big vertical jumps are your 1% low events.

What to fix first

If you're not sure what's causing your bad 1% lows, work through this order — it covers the most common causes first:

1. Check XMP/EXPO is enabled — BIOS, takes 60 seconds, highest impact
2. Close background apps and overlays — Discord, GeForce Experience, Xbox Game Bar
3. Check temperatures under load — HWinfo64, look for throttling events
4. Set a frame cap strategy — cap just below your monitor's refresh rate if using VRR, or to a stable value your GPU can always hit
5. Check VRAM usage — MSI Afterburner overlay, reduce textures if near 100%

If you've worked through all of those and 1% lows are still significantly below average FPS, the issue is likely deeper — CPU scheduling, RAM timing configuration, or a more obscure Windows background process. That's where a session helps: we baseline, diagnose, and fix with before/after proof.