Xperia z1 stuttering

Hi all, did a quick search on Google and on here so apologies if this has been covered before.

Recently my Xperia Z1 has started stuttering. I'm experiencing random jerkiness while scrolling through menus playing games browsing Web etc.

It's very noticeable when playing games. Previously the phone ran real racing 3 pretty much flawlessly, now it's almost unplayable. The issue isn't that the frame rate slows like you would expect when a gpu has bitten off more than it can chew. It's that it runs mostly smoothly but the every few seconds randomly drops a few frames for half a second or less.

This seems to be independent of what temperature the phone is at or what load it is under, simply scrolling through a menu produces the same random skips and jumps as playing a computationally intensive 3d game.

It's running 4.4.4 and the internal storage is only about half full. Any ideas what the cause might be? It's doing my head in! Cheers.

laoisfan

Boot the phone into safe mode and see if the issue reproduces.

http://talk.sonymobile.com/t5/FAQ/How-to-boot-your-phone-into-safe-mode/m-p/348008#U348008

Is the issue reported here the same issue I wonder?

Hey laoisfan, I gave that a go, was hard to assess whether it worked though because all 3rd party apps were disabled, therefore I couldn't assess the phone's performance when running 3d graphics. Interestingly it seemed to stutter and hang a huge amount when flicking between home screens in safe mode, which it doesn't do normally. Internet browsing etc seemed OK.

Any other ideas?

Cheers.

advertsfox

Have you installed any new apps that you generally haven't used before? Are you running multiple messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Viber, WhatsApp etc.