Asus addresses stuttering issues plaguing its gaming laptops — beta patch released for ROG laptops, final fix due in October

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Strix Scar 15 and Zephyrus M16 get first trial updates, with more to follow

ASUS ROG Zephyr
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Asus has begun rolling out beta BIOS updates to address widespread stuttering and performance issues on ROG laptops. The company confirmed September 26 via X.com that it had identified the root cause of the bug and will release finalized firmware beginning in early October. The first trial updates will be available for select configurations of the 2023 Strix Scar 15 (G533ZW) and 2023 Zephyrus M16 (GU604VI).

The BIOS updates arrive after weeks of user reports detailing consistent system-wide issues, audio crackling, and input lag on ROG notebooks. Asus initially said it was investigating the problem, but has now confirmed that engineers have “isolated the issue that causes stuttering and performance interruptions.” According to a statement shared by ROG North America, the company has begun posting beta BIOS versions for the affected SKUs, which will appear on official support pages “in the coming week.” Asus has stated that installing the beta will not void warranty coverage. Expand the tweet below to see Asus's statement.

Reports of the problem began to surface earlier in September, with ROG laptop owners describing repeatable system-wide stutters occurring every 30 to 60 seconds under idle or light load.

A detailed investigation published on GitHub by user Zephkek attributed the issue to BIOS-level ACPI interrupt storms and improper power cycling of the dGPU. Windows performance traces and LatencyMon logs revealed elevated DPC latency associated with ACPI.sys, with a single CPU core consistently experiencing high load. The bug appeared to affect multiple laptop generations from 2021 to 2024, including high-end models such as the Scar and Zephyrus.

The company has not yet provided technical details about the root cause, although it now states that it has implemented a fix in the trial BIOS builds. The beta BIOS for the Strix Scar 15 and Zephyrus M16 is not currently available on Asus’ support site at the time of writing, but affected users are advised to check periodically throughout the week. Asus states that it expects to start rolling out finalized firmware updates for other models in early October.

Users who choose to install the beta BIOS should back up their settings and review the relevant change logs. While Asus has guaranteed that warranty coverage remains intact, test firmware can still carry risk and may not be as stable as the final release.

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Luke James
Luke James
Contributor

Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist.  Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory. 

7 Comments Comment from the forums
  • hotaru251
    only becasue an unpaid user was tired of them not doing the dive themself.
    Should be active punishment to corpo who have issues for yrs they ignore.
    Reply
  • shaslam777
    Unfortunately, this problem also effect my Asus rog Strix G18 laptop. The thing cost me around 7k and to be honest when I first got it i had no issues, but a few bios updates later and it's slower than a 10-year-old PC and that's with a fresh install of windows 11. The latency issues has gotten that bad sometimes files need to be clicked twice before they will delete. My suggestion on anyone looking at this series of laptop I would give them a miss.
    Reply
  • richardnpaul
    I'll test this out almost immediately because this laptop has been a huge dissapointment until now (G533ZW).
    Reply
  • Staszeq95
    This issue affects not only ROG but also TUF series laptops. I even read somewhere that it affected Vivobooks. Although on Reddit, the problem mostly affected ROG and TUF models. I recently got an A15 FA507UV laptop with an R7 8845HS (R780m) and an RTX 4060 140w TGP, and most games experience terrible frame drops, which I haven't tried. In most cases, this reduces the amount of stuttering, but doesn't completely eliminate it. This is my first and last Asus gaming laptop.
    Reply
  • richardnpaul
    I installed the update today. I'm not certain that it has solved all the lagginess I experienced with the laptop and I have further testing to do, but it didn't brick it 😂
    Reply
  • richardnpaul
    Further testing under Ubuntu showed the fans maybe throttling down to 0rpm then going up to about 3000rpm fairly frequently. I did have it ramp up to 6000rpm and Gnome stopped working and I couldn't drop into a tty either, but the mouse would still move about on screen. This was with the dGPU disabled in Ubuntu, but the GPU fan followed the CPU fan with about 300rpm difference between them, which I didn't expect with the dGPU disabled.
    Reply
  • MrEmo
    This is also the case for the newest Strix 18 5090, which is riddled with issues. People are having issues with coil squeeling, usb disconnects, stuttering in games, bluetooth dc's etc etc. This is crazy.
    Reply