Stuttering animations after graphics driver update?

[SHMIZZLE]

Using a 4080 super the game worked flawlessly at launch. I recently updated my drivers and now nearly every animation has a massive stutter the first time I see it, meaning every boss (and regular enemy) encounter means I will almost always take a hit the first time they attack. Toggling between DX11 and DX12, toggling on/off Nvidia frame gen, and toggling vsync does not seem to have any effect. I tried reverting back to the previous drivers released and I still have the problem. Any known fix will be appreciated.

Also note, currently the latest drivers were released 3/18/2025, I reverted back to the drivers released on 3/5/2025. I'm pretty the last drivers I had were older than than so I am attempting to use even older drivers to see if that helps.

[sgrey]

latest nvidia drivers are crap

[TapeTheGobol]

dude im having the same issue its unbearable against the boss im at. Every 3-7 seconds their is a massive stutter. Im honestly beyond annoyed.

[Daematter]

It's called shader compilation. The game does not fully pre-compile shaders, so you will experience stuttering every time you update your driver or game.

[SHMIZZLE]

Originally posted by TapeTheGobol:

dude im having the same issue its unbearable against the boss im at. Every 3-7 seconds their is a massive stutter. Im honestly beyond annoyed.

My issue was on every first animation that you see after booting the game it massively stutters. So basically every first time you see an attack/parry/effect it will stutter but then its clean after that. Very annoying when fighting a boss that has many moves and attacks.

I have a solution now that worked for me, but it seems like if you have a 50xx series GPU then you are out of luck. I reverted my driver back to version 566.36 released on Dec 10 2024. I thought it didn't work at first but after rebooting my PC everything is running smooth again. This is the fight I was really frustrated with because before every attack and effect had a huge stutter but now it feels great. That is after a fresh reboot of the PC too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9EPAXQA8v4

[SHMIZZLE]

Originally posted by Daematter:

It's called shader compilation. The game does not fully pre-compile shaders, so you will experience stuttering every time you update your driver or game.

I knew there was a term for that but it appears it was just a bad driver after all. Reverting back to 566.36 from 12/10/2024 resolved the issue. And no, I wasn't ONLY having the problem after updating the game or driver, it was happening after every single time I booted the game.