Do you get a sound glitch or scratchy sound when the pauses happen? I was having an issue like that for the longest time, deleting fxo and metashaders would sometimes fix it, sometimes not. What finally seems to have fixed it permanently was doing a simple cleanup/repair. I also did pretty much every other suggestion I could find but the repair cleanup was the thing that seemed to finally fix it permanently. I also only have 16gb of RAM. DSC is on the same NVMe with my OS, but the stuttering thing happened with the steam version, standalone, and beta, on either the SSD I had it on orginally, or the NVMe