Shader compilation stutter
The hitch when a PC game meets a new effect and has to compile its shader right then — in the middle of the fight.
Shaders ship in an intermediate form and have to be translated by the driver into machine code for that particular GPU. On a console the hardware is known and everything can be compiled ahead of time; on PC there are thousands of card-and-driver combinations. DirectX 12 and Vulkan made building PSOs the game's job, and engines that create them only on first use freeze for tens of milliseconds — every time a new explosion appears for the first time.
The remedies are a precompilation pass at startup, PSO caches kept between runs, and Valve's shared shader cache for the Steam Deck. The problem became a recurring line item in technical reviews of PC ports throughout the 2020s.