Game hitching after about 45 minutes

[Speetr]

I'm getting really bad hitching after playing the game for about 45 minutes. Each hitch lasts about 1-2 seconds and happens about every 30-45 seconds. I enabled console for my last session and grabbed some of the text that was recorded during the hitching.

I'm running the latest drivers of everything. I have an AMD Ryzen 5600X, nvidia 3070, 16GB DDR4, and the game is installed on a samsung 970 EVO Plus.

I also followed some advice in another thread where they suggested running from a desktop shortcut and checking the box for "Disable fullscreen optimizations" which didn't help. I have no mods installed.

Console output:
CSwapChainBase::QueuePresentAndWait() looped for 21 iterations without a present event.
Excessive frame time of 520.47ms clamped. Acting as if the frame only took 100.00ms
Framerate spike report
FrameTotal: 520.47ms, tolerance: 52.05ms
excl ms excl % incl ms group
-------- ------- -------- --------------
303.22ms 58.26% 506.67ms Present_RenderDevice
208.41ms 40.04% 512.79ms Client Rendering
1.38ms 0.26% 520.47ms Unaccounted
1.10ms 0.21% 1.10ms Networking
1.08ms 0.21% 1.08ms PanoramaUI
1.02ms 0.20% 1.38ms Prediction
0.86ms 0.16% 0.86ms Interpolation
0.75ms 0.14% 0.78ms Client Physics
0.52ms 0.10% 0.70ms ClientSimulateFrame
0.52ms 0.10% 1.86ms ClientSimulateTick
0.28ms 0.05% 0.28ms Animation

C_BasePlayerPawn::OnPostPredictionError( ) prediction distance 50.806 - teleporting
C_BasePlayerPawn::OnPostPredictionError( ) prediction distance 54.015 - teleporting
C_BasePlayerPawn::OnPostPredictionError( ) prediction distance 57.481 - teleporting
[Animation 2] Different skeleton for referenced graph detected, this is not allowed. Trying to use 'animgraphs/animgraph2/hero/hero_throw.vnmgraph' within 'animgraphs/animgraph2/hero/hero_playercontrol.vnmgraph+mcginnis.vnmgraph'
[Animation 2] Different skeleton for referenced graph detected, this is not allowed. Trying to use 'animgraphs/animgraph2/hero/hero_motionset_masks.vnmgraph' within 'animgraphs/animgraph2/hero/hero_playercontrol.vnmgraph+mcginnis.vnmgraph'
[Animation 2] Different skeleton for referenced graph detected, this is not allowed. Trying to use 'animgraphs/animgraph2/hero/hero_leans.vnmgraph' within 'animgraphs/animgraph2/hero/hero_playercontrol.vnmgraph+mcginnis.vnmgraph'
[Animation 2] Different skeleton for referenced graph detected, this is not allowed. Trying to use 'animgraphs/animgraph2/hero/hero_flinch.vnmgraph' within 'animgraphs/animgraph2/hero/hero_playercontrol.vnmgraph+mcginnis.vnmgraph'
Cannot apply Ragdoll impulse, body part root_motion is not physicalized
C_BasePlayerPawn::OnPostPredictionError( ) prediction distance 10411.352 - teleporting

 

[iyabiya]

I also had this issue for a while, usually it started happening after an hour or so of playing. After the update, though, it started happening much sooner. I think at one point it happened after only like 20 minutes.
After updating my CPU and GPU drivers, it's gone away, at least for now. Maybe that'll help someone else too. Regardless, I never had this issue with any other games, so presumably something about Deadlock is part of the problem.

 

[Speetr]

Do you have any hardware similar to mine listed above? I have already updated all my drivers, but I have a few other things I'm planning to test next time I play:

Switch game from borderless window to fullscreen
Disable discord overlay
Disable steam resource monitor overlay
Disable steam game recording

 

[iyabiya]

I have an AMD Ryzen 5 3600X and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Super. Someone else built this PC for me and idk what I'm talking about but I think the drive it's installed on is called WDC WD10EZEX-22RKKA0.

 

[Speetr]

Not sure if something was patched or if this change fixed it, but I disabled the discord overlay and didn't have any problems in a 2 hour session today.

 

[zmkirtley01]

Huge +1. I have been suffering from this for weeks. I just restart after every game now, because if I don't, my next match is outright ruined.

 

[zmkirtley01]

Updating my drivers and using Nvidia's "optimize" functionality has seemingly fixed this for me.

 

[iyabiya]

Well, scratch what I said earlier in the thread, because the issue is back now. Can't play more than like 45 minutes before it slowly starts hitching, and then the hitches keep increasing in frequency until it's barely playable.

Thankfully, in the game that it first happened again, I was playing Victor, so standing around like an idiot in the middle of the enemy team is actually just optimal gameplay

 

[trodney3700]

I have a similar issue in that there seems to be a "trigger" event that occurs during the match that gives a massive performance hit for me, causing hitching on DLSS and massive framerate drops on FSR 2.

Here is my FPS before said trigger (note that the FPS counter in the top right was bugged at the time):
View attachment Deadlock - 2026-01-31 3-28-43 PM.mp4

I've isolated the "trigger" to this point later in the game when I roamed to the other side of the map. The game had a big performance hit for the rest of the game after this point until I did a restart (which only partially helped):

View attachment Deadlock - 2026-01-31 3-29-14 PM.mp4

Apologies in advance since I'm not very good with Computers, but I have tried a lot of fixes that were shown on the web and on these forums. Switching from DLSS model to FSR 2 helped with the hitching but now instead of hitching I get a large FPS drop after the "trigger" event. Please let me know if there is any additional info I can provide, would love to help diagnose what is causing this.

 

[zmkirtley01]

Yeah, scratch me saying I fixed it, I'm suffering again...

 

[AstralBleat]

+1, been suffering with this for weeeeeks, nothing i do to fix it works