Game freezes then continues: what causes the pause and how to stop it

Why a freeze is a different problem from stutter

A stutter is one slow frame among many, a hitch you notice in motion. A freeze is the game stopping completely, often with audio looping or cutting out, for long enough that you have time to wonder whether it has crashed. That difference in length points to a different kind of cause. Stutter usually comes from work happening inside a frame; a freeze means the game, or the whole system, was waiting on something that did not respond.

The usual suspects are a drive that stalled, memory that ran out, a graphics driver that stopped responding and had to be restarted, severe overheating, or a device disconnecting and reconnecting. Each of those tends to leave evidence, so the first job is to look for it rather than to change settings. If your problem is short, frequent hitches instead, the stuttering guide is the better fit.

The usual causes and their fingerprints

Read Windows' own record of the freeze

Right after a freeze, before restarting, open Reliability Monitor by typing "reliability" into the Start menu. It lays out errors and warnings day by day. Look at the day of the freeze for hardware errors, application hangs or a display driver that stopped responding and recovered.

For more detail, open Event Viewer and check Windows Logs, System, around the time of the freeze. Warnings from the display driver point at the graphics card or its driver. Warnings from the disk or storage controller point at the drive. If nothing is logged at all, keep Task Manager or an on-screen display running so that the next freeze shows which resource was at its limit.

Fix: graphics driver recovery

When a graphics driver stops responding, Windows restarts it rather than crashing, and the game freezes while that happens. Install the current driver cleanly from NVIDIA, AMD or Intel, or go back one version if the freezes started after an update. Remove any graphics card overclock or undervolt, including factory settings changed in tuning software, and test at default. A power supply struggling under sudden load can produce the same symptom, which becomes more likely if freezes happen at the most demanding moments of a game.

Fix: a drive that stalls

A game installed on a hard drive, or a system drive with almost no free space, can make everything wait on storage for seconds at a time. Move the game to an SSD if possible and free space on the system drive. Check the drive's health with a free tool that reads its built-in health data, such as CrystalDiskInfo; a drive reporting reallocated sectors or other warnings should be backed up and replaced, because freezes are often the first sign of a failing drive. Update the storage controller and chipset drivers from the motherboard or PC maker.

Fix: memory running out

When memory is exhausted, Windows pages data to the drive, and a game that suddenly needs something paged out waits for it. Close browsers and other heavy programs before playing, and keep the page file enabled and managed by Windows; disabling it replaces the freeze with a crash, as the page file reference explains. If you use a memory profile such as XMP or EXPO and freezes began after enabling it, test at the memory's default speed, since an unstable profile can cause freezes as well as crashes. The XMP and EXPO reference covers that trade-off.

Fix: heat and devices

If freezes only appear after some time playing, watch temperatures leading up to one. Components at their thermal limit throttle hard and can briefly stall. Clean fans and heatsinks and improve airflow before anything else.

If you hear Windows' device sounds during a freeze, a USB device is dropping out and reconnecting. Try a different port, preferably one directly on the motherboard rather than a hub or front-panel connector, and stop Windows suspending USB ports to save power, as the USB selective suspend reference describes.

Why an optimizer is rarely the answer here

Most causes of a freeze that recovers are hardware, drivers or storage, and no Windows optimizer changes any of those. A maintenance tool can help if the system drive is badly short of space, and power settings can matter for devices dropping out, but beyond that software has little to offer. Gaming optimizers versus cleaners explains which kind of tool fits which problem, and the PC lag guide covers slowdowns that stop short of a freeze.

JINSHI PC Tweaks is our product. It covers Windows settings such as USB power saving and power behaviour, lists every change on the complete tweak list and reverses each one individually, but it will not fix a failing drive or an unstable driver, and we would rather say so here. If the settings side is what you need, the JINSHI Tweaks homepage shows what PC Tweaks covers. For a wider checklist, see how to choose a PC optimizer for gaming.