I had this happen tonight and managed to figure out what it was... or at least I figured out what was causing it for me. For me it was DLSS. I think the new Nvidia drivers did... something.

I had DLSS on with it set to DLAA, and started having really bad framerate and stuttering issues. I took it from DLAA to Quality and everything smoothed out. Game still looks amazing, and now it runs at a much higher framerate.

I know, I know... it isn't exactly the same as my native 4k. But it still looks amazing, and the framerate improvements were totally worth it. I have to be getting a steady 100+ easy now.

I'll wait for some updates or something and try it again at some point.

I have the same issue, did you find the solution ? (No Simoso)

I've actually had this issue since before the patch, but I think it made it worse. I get a solid 60 FPS on launch, and after maybe 15 or 20 minutes I start noticing occasional skips and hitching, and by the time I've been playing for an hour it's skipping so much that it's hard to play. Quitting and restarting fixes the issue immediately.

Lowering the resolution and/or reducing DLSS quality makes it take longer for performance to noticeably degrade, but it still happens eventually.

Originally posted by ExTRo:

I have the same issue, did you find the solution ? (No Simoso)

nope. Tried changing settings, redownloaded the entire game, etc. Nothing's worked. I think it may be a memory leak or something, so something that'd have to be fixed on Sandfall's end /:

Guess i'll just have to hold off on playing until the next patch

... And here I thought it was due to me running the game in a compatibility layer (Proton). Yes, I have noticed this, especially when playing at high resolution (4K) with DLAA, since the game has no way to force a given resolution without an upscaler, I decided to take the long route and force my display to be either 1080p, 1440p and 4k in desktop beofre launching the game, so DLAA would be set for either resolution at full. In my local runs of the game, the part of the game where I currently am, triggers the issue quite quickly, Frozen Hearts, of the three resolutions, the one that shows the issue fastest (within minutes of starting the game and it presenting) has been 4K.

Also, for some reason, the game forces frame generation to on (auto). For these tests I disabled it. And seems that if it is ON, the stutter issue is much, much worse (like frame cloning, as if a frame skipped was later rendered, very, very odd)

System specs:

CPU: Ryzen 9 9950X3D
RAM: 64 GiB 6000 MTS
GPU: RTX 5080 16 GiB

For geeks:
Fedora Linux 42 6.15.9 kernel
Proton set to 9.0-4 (happens with Hotfix, Experimental and 10.2 beta)
Steam Beta Client