Weird stuttery lag?

[Vex Phoenix]

Been playing relentlessly for months, but the past few days something has been causing my mouse input for looking around to be horribly laggy and stuttery. It's nothing to do with the graphical settings as nothing has changed and my PC is beefy. Nothing has changed with my PC, I tried verifying the game cache, starting a new save, playing in different resolutions and nothing has helped. it makes the game feel thoroughly unpleasant to play! any advice?

[H34VY_R41N]

Disable VSync?

[IFIYGD]

Even on beefy rigs SSAO can cause stutter or microhitches for some people. Try turning SSAO to Low or Off and see if it persists.
Simple things like driver updates or OS updates can cause changes in how your rig runs a game even if you changed nothing in the game's settings, as well. If changing SSAO or VSync/GSync settings does not help, check to see if you had any driver or OS updates right before this started happening.
And if you have a spare mouse, swap it in (make sure your mouse is fully plugged in or has good battery levels too).
One last thing is to close and exit Steam Client completely, and launch the game offline (start a new disposable save to test, so you don't lose progress if you are using Cloud Saves via Steam) by finding the .exe file in local game files and launching it from there, to see if Steam Client's current bugs from the Summer Sale are causing any issues.

If none of that ^^^ helps, you can file a formal bug report to get help directly from Hinterland Tech here: https://hinterlandgames.zendesk.com/

[Vex Phoenix]

Originally posted by IFIYGD:

Even on beefy rigs SSAO can cause stutter or microhitches for some people. Try turning SSAO to Low or Off and see if it persists.
Simple things like driver updates or OS updates can cause changes in how your rig runs a game even if you changed nothing in the game's settings, as well. If changing SSAO or VSync/GSync settings does not help, check to see if you had any driver or OS updates right before this started happening.
And if you have a spare mouse, swap it in (make sure your mouse is fully plugged in or has good battery levels too).
One last thing is to close and exit Steam Client completely, and launch the game offline (start a new disposable save to test, so you don't lose progress if you are using Cloud Saves via Steam) by finding the .exe file in local game files and launching it from there, to see if Steam Client's current bugs from the Summer Sale are causing any issues.

If none of that ^^^ helps, you can file a formal bug report to get help directly from Hinterland Tech here: https://hinterlandgames.zendesk.com/

Fantastic advice, a lot of which I should have thought of myself. I already knew about SSAO killing performance and had it on medium, low and off made no difference. tried all your other suggestions and had no luck with any of it! Still just getting weird microstutter thats most noticeable when moving and panning the camera, sometimes itll even revert back a few frames from the latency! I did check with updates and I had just updated my OS and drivers very recently, but it seems strange something like that would cause this. Could it be a bug with the most recent win10 update and unity games handling camera code?

I suppose I will file a bug report, since it seems that if the update is the cause then it seems it's only affecting this one game. real shame!

[Vex Phoenix]

UPDATE: After scanning through a few support topics, I tried forcing the game to launch with OpenGL (using the launch command -force-glcore) and it seems to have fixed the stuttering! seems strange since I thought forcing openGL was more a legacy option for older systems, and mine is barely two years old! either way, back in business it seems! thanks for your help

[IFIYGD]

Awesome. Glad you found a fix that worked so quickly.
Now get back to enjoying your game. :)