Heh, don't ask me. Keeping Chrome running is a proven fix for the stutters many people experience in some of the more buggy games (DX:HR Director's Cut being one).
Running your browser in the b/g doesn't hurt performance one bit, modern OS's can easily juggle multiple gigs of memory among multiple apps.
I have ~10 tabs open at any given time and never shut down my browser even while gaming. And I doubt I am the only one who does this, I believe this is pretty normal for most PC users nowadays.
Back on topic; low framerates and more importantly stuttering is a valid reason for RMA. It's a 1080ti and not some budget gpu.
Don't feed them any dubious claims like 'VRAM can't handle huge loads', just present your problem as it is, it's a genuine case.
I have ff opened all time with 7-8 tabs which all eat 4gigs and gaming on it wont affect at all as i have 18gb ram.
But i always prefer running clean. So be it gaming or watching movies i close all things and watch afresh.
Still will try the trick if ever any games stutter henceforth.
I finally recorded all HM logs in CS GO & Fortnite, also have retested all other games with older & beta NVIDIA drivers (385.69, 385.12 BETA & 382.53).
Bad news:
1. There are no noticeable improvements in eliminating stutter using any other drivers. GTA 5, TW3 and PUBG (for e.g. only).
2. There are SOME annoying spikes in Fortnite BR but they're not so frequent.
HM Logs:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ULxP2IRVD-esOUIESc9gHVo5FOlXGIn-
Good news:
1. There are NO frametime spikes in CS:GO offline battle WITHOUT any bots. But there're noticeable in Community Servers even with low ping, maybe, it's server or player amount related. Don't know what's wrong with online CS playing. Tried Steam version and pirated one, no changes in performance.
HM Logs:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1BaoQVGbbNPg1awHhGfvD6YzFcqbmrIrM
2. NVIDIA driver 385.69 (Sep, 2017) helps a bit to reduce spikes in GTA 5 and PUBG. Frametime graph is more smooth. Maybe it's random event and driver isn't related to this temporary frametime "smoothness". You can compare logs with different drivers and make conclusion am I right or not.
PUBG HM Logs with 397.31 driver:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NN8FuX05oKRXXWyoE-0wLsG10hJDUgho
PUBG HM Logs with 385.69 driver:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1gQlE3ZD6UFfhcJrSmocx1FUyUqs-EgdX
Questions:
1. What do you think about all these tests?
2. Can NVIDIA drivers be the only one culprit by following the new results? Or it's more game related?
3. What another working fixes should I try to make a workaround if it's game related?
P.S.
I play GTA 5
single player only, not multiplayer.