Stuttering/Choppiness

[Unruly]

This isn't a rant but a cry for help, I guess.

I haven't seen any discussion on this, just a few off hand remarks in game, about navigating after the mar 25 update. In guild channel, a few pple have mentioned about town being almost un-navigable.

Previous to that I had been trying to address some annoying, once-a-second brief pauses. Anecdotal posts on the web said it was a common, albeit rare persistent problem some people had with Unity. After the mar 25, I could hardly navigate anywhere, and towns where people are (ie, Serbule, constantly) become teeth grinding visits. I literally can not turn around rapidly without incurring a full second long stall, after which I'm facing a random direction. If I was moving while turning, I might be 10 feet from where the pause started, again in a random direction.

Subsequent patches got a _little_ better, and I've since upgraded to an RX 480 which is a little better still. However, the same stalls & choppiness can still be had anywhere. Between the nvidia & radeon I did a complete reinstall of the game, though there's really little to screw up in that regard.


I have, of course, tried every level of graphic quality & fiddled extensively with the additional graphic options. None seem to reduce the choppiness or really raise my fps.

Interestingly, while this stuttering is going on, the fps shown doesn't go down. It didn't with my nvidia gtx660 ti and it doesn't now with the radeon rx 480. Otherwise my machine, while older, isn't being taxed. (i7-920, 80% idle, and no one core at more than 40% usage. 24 gb ram, ssd as system drive and which the game is also installed on.) I'm tempted to install the game in a ram drive & see if the stalls get shorter, then at least I'll be clearer that it's some kind of I/O interrupting things.

There is really no reason at all for this to be happening. Are others seeing this as well and just not talking about it?

edit: playing from a ram drive has again sorta reduced the choppiness, but there are still frequent complete stalls while the game does..... something, then resumes smooth operation. I guess the next experiment is on a fresh install of windows.