Game Freezes and Stutters for Multiple Seconds After April Patch

Age of Empires II: DE II - Report a Bug
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:play_button: GAME & SYSTEM INFORMATION

  • GAME BUILD #: July PUP 2025 Preview Version (101.103.20329.0 - #151401)
  • GAME PLATFORM: Steam
  • OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows 10
  • CPU: Intel i7-6700
  • RAM: 32GB DDR4
  • GPU: RTX 4070 & GTX 960 2GB
  • SSD: 1TB Cruicial MX500

:play_button: ISSUE EXPERIENCED

Ever since the April patch, my screen has been freezing every 5-10 minutes for 2-5 seconds but the cursor is still moveable. The issue is present in both SP & MP, this is not an internet-related issue. Logging out of Xbox does not work. I’ve noticed that the GPU usage temporarily drops to 0% for the duration of those freezes. This is extremely frustrating as those freezes have given the enemy a big advantage.

This appears to be very noticeable among users with older or previous gen CPUs (e.g., Intel i7-6700, i7-8800).

This issue has been happening since the April patch. I just tested the July PUP beta and the issue is still there.

I tried the following, but nothing worked:

  • Upgrading my GPU
  • Adding 16GB of RAM
  • Clean installing my Windows SSD via bootable SSD
  • Verifying files
  • Logging out of Xbox Live/Game Mode
  • Removing power saving options

NOTE: This is not to be confused with the ongoing: Problems with game stuttering (most reproducibly when units are trained) micro stuttering issue, those are two separate screen-freezing problems.

:play_button: FREQUENCY OF ISSUE

  • 100% of the time / matches I play (ALWAYS), approximately every 5-10 minutes of gameplay

:play_button: REPRODUCTION STEPS

Play the game in either single player or multiplayer, the screen and gameplay will freeze for 2-3 seconds while the cursor will still be moveable.

:play_button: VIDEO

User BenjLike shared a perfect demonstration of the problem in this clip: Twitch Clip

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Same here. Extremely annoying. I have already tried everything to fix it, but nothing seems to do the trick.

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Same here too, not as frequent, but still annoying.

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I even bought a new expensive GPU/RAM/SSD, clean installed Windows, nothing works. I guess this is a CPU core optimization issue on AOE’s end because folks with high-end CPUs don’t notice this as much.

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Just counted, for me, the freeze frequency seems to be every 7:36 in-game mins sharp which translates to ~5:05 real life minutes, then it repeats itself again at 15:12 in-game seconds (~10:10 real mins).

So there must be a CPU-intensive process that gets executed every 5 mins sharp that takes 5 seconds, and it overloads the core causing the GPU to freeze (since CPU activity isn’t changed during the freeze and folks with higher CPUs don’t feel this freeze). Perhaps a background attempt to connect to Xbox live?

I hope the devs read this (probably won’t), because this seems like a very straight and forward fix.

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For comparison:

SYSTEM INFORMATION

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700G
GPU: GTX 1060 6GB
RAM: 16GB DDR4
SSD: NVMe 250GB
OS: Windows 11
GAME BUILD: I’m also using the July PUP 2025

I also tried it on a Linux distro I have on a dual boot on the same machine. Same thing happens.