I feel like random freezing/stutter is due to CPU overloading. It happens a lot when AAA is firing at me or someone is shooting.
At that instant, the CPU usage on process explorer saturated for the thread 0xdfa000.
The second highest thread hooked to nvapi (nvidia api, not sure if it's sound or control the graphic render) is not any higher than 3% CPU (12.5% is saturation for 4 cores 8 threads)
I'm using a 3770 i7 and 1080Ti GPU. In normal situation, it's 60FPS even at trees/nap of the earth flying.
What happens here is likely the game simulation (ballistics/guidance/hitting) overloads the CPU, this causes real timing simulation to lag behind and the corresponding video frame rendering postponed accordingly. It's not a GPU limitation but CPU.
But here my take, 3770 is not a lot slower compared to recent CPUs in terms of frequency at single thread. And only recent update to 2.5 starts to slow things down. I think ED should really devote some time into such optimization. Some areas such as vecterization should be done. We can think of every object acting the same under gravity/drag/thrust. Thus SIMD should really help. Or maybe let GPU to handle some of those ballistic simulations.