As the title states, I'm experiencing near-constant stutters/hitches, regardless of what I'm doing in-game. The issue first occurred last night, but I dismissed it as just frame drops, as it first occurred in-mission while there was a lot going on. This morning I found out, to my dismay, that it is still happening.
In the orbiter, both the in-game statistics and the GeForce overlay show consistent 144fps and >6ms frametime, even in the midst of these stutters. In missions, depending on what's going on, both the in-game statistics and GeForce overlay show 90-144fps with 8-10ms frametime. This performance is normal for me, and I have not experienced these stutters before last night. The stutters occur every 2-3 seconds, in all display modes, beginning when I launch the game. The game is installed on a 1TB m.2 SSD with 400+ GB of free space, and the drive is not shared with the OS. I've been bashing my head against this problem for a few hours now and I'm completely at a loss here- I have tried everything I know to try, but the stutters are still there with no indication of a hardware/software issue on my end. Any help would be appreciated.
My specs are as follows;
GTX 1650 Super 4GB
Intel i5 10400F
16GB Crucial Ballistix DDR4-2666 RAM (2x8GB)
Windows 11 Home
So far, I have tried the following, with no effect;
Disabled GPU overclock
Restarted game
Ended all nonessential background tasks
Disabled G-Sync
Switched between DX11 and DX12, and Enhanced/Classic graphics engines
Lowered graphics settings
Changed display modes and refresh rate/frame cap
Restarted PC
Deleted the Nvidia shader cache
Updated graphics driver
Restarted PC again following the last two steps
Ran GPU benchmark and compared results with my baseline, benchmark scores were as expected
Trimmed SSD
Reinstalled the game to the same drive
Ran defrags, and then installed the game to two different drives
Ran full system diagnostics using built in BIOS utility, no issues found
Tested RAM with a RAM tester, no issues found
Swapped RAM with known good sticks (2x4GB sticks)
As you can see, I've gotten a bit desperate for a solution. I have already generated logs through the launcher, so if this last-ditch effort falls through, I'll contact official support channels.
Thanks for your time :)