LightingService.exe Causing Stuttering!

[SimonSlays]

Hello,

I have been dealing with stuttering in almost every game since I purchased my ASUS ROG Strix RTX 4090 OC. I originally thought the issue was a CPU bottleneck as I had an i9 9900k paired with this GPU, this caused me to purchase a new motherboard (ASUS ROG Crosshair X670E Hero), RAM (Corsair Dominator Platinum 6000Mhz CL30) and CPU (AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D) to try and remedy the issue but it did not seem to make any difference. I am getting more performance in every game but I am still getting the horrible stuttering mess until I disable the LightingService.exe. I would like to use Armoury Crate/ Aura Creator as I love having my RGB lighting on all my hardware synced up but it's unbearable to deal with this stutter. It's strange because my ASUS ROG Strix RTX 2080 Ti never had this issue when LightingService.exe was enabled.

The games where it is most prevalent is Assassin's Creed Origins and Assassin's Creed Odyssey which are both CPU intensive games. Please go test it out on these games in particular and you will see what I mean. Some other games also suffer from this but not as badly with the limited testing I have done.

I have tried limiting my fps to 3 below my monitors refresh rate as well as setting low latency mode to Ultra in Nvidia Control Panel but that did not make any difference. The only thing that completely stops the issue is disabling LightingService.exe. I can even run iCUE and have zero issues with stutter. It's looking like I will have to use the lighting link feature in iCUE to sink up all my devices until this issue is resolved.

If you can try get your team to fix this then i'd be eternally grateful as well as many others that I have seen complain about this issue.

Thanks for reading.

[drGruncho]

Same here. I have ROG X299-E Gaming II + 3080TI + core i9 10900X and 64GB of RAM. 

I have done many tests installing and uninstalling software, I have formatted the computer and reinstalled windows with the Nvidia and Armory Crate drivers and just then the stuttering starts.

Maybe the las update of AC? 5.6.3.0? 

I'm playing OverWatch 2 at 360fps with a PG259QNR and I have Stuttering! its unbeliable.

Any fix please?

[SimonSlays]

I too am on a fresh Windows 11 install that I installed yesterday with only Armoury Crate/ Aura Creator, iCUE, Aura Sync/ iCUE plugin, Steam and a few other game launchers currently installed. It’s 100% LightingService.exe that has been ruining my gaming experience since purchasing my 4090.

At this sort of price range I would expect the software to work with the hardware, not hinder it.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the lighting performance option in Armoury Crate actually made the lighting run worse (lagging) when I selected all of the components in Aura Creator and created a custom lighting effect. If I switched off performance mode it seemed to run fine. Maybe there is something hardware wise (LED strips) that’s affecting my pc? I’m honestly not sure because my PC ran great until I got the 4090.

Edit 2: I think I’ve finally found the root cause of the stuttering. If I go into Armoury Crate and tick the 4090 box to sync up the RGB lighting with the rest of the system that’s when the issue starts. If I set the lighting on the RTX 4090 page to static instead of any moving effects then the issue goes away. Very strange that moving lighting effects as well as syncing up the lighting with the GPU causing so much CPU usage and stutter.

[mmck617]

I know that RGB Lighting and Gaming are fairly Taboo... LightingService.exe is likely punishing gamers because some might try to configure the lighting for hack purposes, like an unfair advantage. 

May not be the correct answer, but gaming and RGB lighting have been in a quarrel for a long time.

[OnlyAlex]

Mate I can’t thank you enough for your edits, literally helped me out so much. I changed the static effect a few weeks ago to breathing and had micro stutters and it really annoyed me. Saw your comment and reversed the RGB back to static and no more micro stutters. Whilst it’s a shambles that on a 2.5k laptop the moving RGB causes micro stutters, I’m just glad I’ve got around the problem. Cheers again! 

[SimonSlays]

Hi mate, glad it was able to be of some use to you. Unfortunately it seems like they still haven’t bothered to fix this issue and they don’t care to even acknowledge it exists. My Ryzen 7 7800X3D doesn’t seem to like having this software running in the background with anything other than the static effect. Quite annoying as I can run iCUE with moving effects and the CPU usage is around 0.1-1.4% whereas Armoury Crate likes to go up to 3.5% which causes the micro stutters. The same can also be said with NZXT Cam which is also a trash piece of software.

[OnlyAlex]

Yeah it's so annoying and frustrating - I wish ASUS would fix this issue, or at least respond to us on the forums. I know it's a pain but at least with the static effect I have a workaround for the time being, the micro stutters were doing my head in. Next time I won't be spending 2.5k with ASUS, that's for sure! 

[OnlyAlex]

Do you mind me asking mate, is it ok to uninstall Armoury Crate using their uninstaller and re-install? I've done it a few times since owning this laptop, doing it doesn't seem to affect anything - everything is ok after, but I'm just a bit anxious to keep doing it - apparently it's a requirement for ASUS to investigate further. Cheers! 

[OnlyAlex]

Is anyone experiencing this technical issue still? I am but it seems to be much less often. Would be interested to hear from others.