Problem with Bioshock Infinite and other games stuttering [the mystery deepens]

Bioshock Infinite and Batman Arkham City, both using Unreal Engine 3, have this same issue as far as I know.

Have you installed anything recently or even updated anything? And are you running games with essentially nothing open? I would assume something is using a bit of memory every now and then which may be lowering your FPS, but honestly I know jack shiz so I could be very wrong. I would prob try updating your graphics driver anyway, and checking the resource manager to see if something is up.

simple very simple if it started recently check if you installed a newer gpu driver update or any other programma for "accelerations" unistall them and try again.If nothing helped then try to see if your laptop is dust free and if the cpu has enough thermal paste.One of these are 100% sure will work.P.S. one last thing check if your laptop use the dedicated gpu and not the cpu gpu{cpu gpu is intel HD {there goes four numbers usually 4xxx or 5xxx and dedicated is nvidia or amd}

My infinite has started to do this as well. It does it mostly when the game starts and you have to press a key to go to the menu. It will lag a lot. Reason for this is heavy heavy HDD load. I should probably just move the game to my SSD.

Try defragging your HDD. I did; it did not have a huge effect, but it may for you.

Added: I can see you use an external drive for the game. That would be the reason. It probably uses USB2 right? Unless you can use external sata (esata), you should really have the game on your internal HDD or better yet SSD.

Check the ini. Look for something called "Allow Streaming" and set it to false.

If your laptop has USB 2.0 ports, you're screwed. The data rate on those is awful. You really need USB 3.0 or ESATA connection to be able to play a graphics-intensive game from an external drive. Also, preferably a flash based drive rather than standard mechanical disk hard drive.

search google, there are ini settings that will remove level streaming. But it might break some levels

Could definitely be the USB drive going out on you that's connecting the external HDD, but there are a lot of other possibilities as well!

The mystery has deepened after further experimentation.

I used to have the exact same problem with Arkham City Goty.I tried to tone down textures,resolution but nothing worked at all.The game was laggy although never freezed,just impossible to play.I am not sure about the frame rates I have been getting before or after the fix so can't help you with that.Turning "Directx 11" on helped me play this smoothly.That option can be found in the game settings dialogue box that you get when you click "Play" in the steam library.

I had the same stuttering problem a while back, but I fixed it by doing this:
Start > Computer > Select your main disk > Right click > Properties > Tools tab > Check Now button > checkmark the Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors option.
I hope you'll manage to resolve your problem.

I had problems with Bioshock Infinite, it crashed always when I met the Fireguy. I found out that it depends on the nvidia Geforce, there's a optimize option. After I deleted the .config and didn't use optimize all went well.

why you so sure about hdd? stuttering can have different nature.

• try downgradin video drivers
• try tweaking threading and graphics optimizations (eg. nvidia has some predefined tweaks for some games to optimize them but sometimes this leads to stuttering/corruptions)
• try changing vsync mode in game/drivers
• check your cpu/gpu temps
• check for any suspitious apps with high cpu load in background

and about streaming... heavy hdd load? don't listen to that jokes.

you know this means the engine can get textures/models asynchronously in realtime - yep that means when it loads something it doesn't lead to slowdowns and stuttering just because it does that in background (not in rendering thread) and it can even load lower resolution models/textures first and load same textures with higher resolution only when it's free :)

It's laptop, so check power saving settings and temps. Also try closing all open apps (the ones in tray too), firewalls, AV etc. Have you checked for viruses/malware?

I'm guessing there's an issue with your ram. Same thing happened to my desktop when one of the ram slots broke. Switching out to a different slot or using a different piece of ram might help.

Since you suspect it is the hard disk, you might want to uninstall the drivers using device manager and then do a quick restart.