Assassin's Creed Odyssey extremely regular microstutters (#likeclockwork)

[ItsJustMidnight]

Hey guys,

 

I'm running into an extremely infuriating issue in Assassins Creed Odyssey. In extremely regular intervals (somewhere around 1.8s, see attached in-game performance graph), the framerate will drop to 0 completely, then run perfectly fine again. This results in a completely unplayable experience where e.g. when panning around it feels like the game drops a significant number of frames and the camera skips around jarringly in that time. Once the hitch is over, in between the dips, everything runs as expected until a few seconds later again. This makes a game I enjoyed very much completely unplayable all of a sudden.

 

I know that the game is poorly optimised and can run rough/stuttery at times. But this seems different, especially because the game ran perfectly fine (for my liking) for almost 200h on this machine before. Unfortunately I can not revert to the obvious change that must have happened because I put the game down for a few weeks before noticing this and since installed/uninstalled various software, installed windows updates, driver updates etc. It also does not occur in other games.

 

I am running the following system:

• CPU: 5600X (no OC from my side)
• GPU: GTX 1060 6GB (stock)
• RAM: Corsair Vengeance 32GB 3200MHz (on XMP)
• MB: Aorus B550I Pro AX
• Display: contrary to uploaded image, Dell U2518D at 2560x1440
• SSD (OS): Samsung 970 Evo
• SSD (game): Samsung 850 Evo
• OS: W10

I've tried the usual suspects of recommended graphics settings from common threads on poor ACO performance (reinstalling game, running in full-screen mode, capping fps, vsync on, disabling full-screen optimisation, increasing task priority) but nothing makes the slightest change to the behaviour. That makes me want to bang my head against the wall, since it feels like I am missing something obvious.

 

Please, if anyone has an idea on what could be causing this, I would love to get back to playing...

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

Try DDU if you haven't already:

 

https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html

[ItsJustMidnight]

That was a great idea, I hadn't tried that yet. Though no dice on this one, unfortunately. Exactly the same behaviour.

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

Have you messed with any of the Windows gaming settings like Hardware accelerated GPU scheduling? Or with any of the Windows Power Options settings?

 

Have you checked the Task Manager for background applications that may be robbing CPU cycles?

[Montana One-Six]

Only this game or does it happen in every game?

 

Had some similar issues a while back after changing my power plan in windows. The issue was that Link State Power Management under PCI Express in the advanced power plan settings was set to something else other than off.