Lag & Stuttering Still Make this Game Unplayable

[Isidorius]

.. and it's frustrating me to no end. I never got to finish this game years ago, but now.. the game is just unplayable (for me, obviously).

I've seen plenty of threads on these boards describing the exact problems I'm having, but no ~definitive solutions.

Tons of micro-stuttering/jerking, some rubberbanding, huge lag spikes (and subsequent rubberbanding) when opening/closing UI elements like inventory panels.

All this from the very first seconds of a brand new game, in the first little village.

i7-6700K 4GHz, 32GB RAM, Windows 10 Home 64bit, GeForce GTX 980, SSD

I've tried the game installed on a normal and SSD drive. I've tried toggling the vsync settings in three different places (in-game, nvidia inspector and the nvidia control panel), I've tried different game resolutions paired with desktop resolutions, I've tried various combinations of resolutions and windowed/not windowed, I'e tried with clean boots and no other applications (including AV software) at all running, I've tried disabling a slew of graphics features (including but not limited to AA, Gsync, AF, etc.) in all those places as well.. I've even tried changing the dang font, and I'm kind of at the end of my rope here and wondering what the heck is it that I'm missing? Clearly I'm in a minority of players that have this problem.. but what else can I even look at to sort this out?

Because as it stands, not a single change has made a difference in this behavior and all I'm left to do is uninstall the game and never play it..

I've seen patch notes referring to the fixing of rubberbanding, etc, but I have a feeling those issues are the not the same as whatever this is.

Ugh :(

[Somebody]

If your Titan Quest installation is not on the same drive as the savegame:

Move the "Titan Quest - Immortal Throne" folder from "Documents/my games" to the drive where Titan Quest is installed, and then create a hardlink to the new save location. Put the link into "Documents/my games" and name it "Titan Quest - Immortal Throne", so the game can find it.

To create a hardlink to a folder (also called "directory juction" in Windows), you need to use the Windows CMD and use the command "mklink /J <link> <target>".

Use a fast drive that has no constant usage, so preferably not the one where Windows is installed.

This has fixed it for me and I posted it on most threads with the same problem, which solved it for most people.

[buk1962]

Try Alt+Tab.

[Malgardian]

In addition to what Somebody said: Try to run TQ as admin and with XP compatibility settings. Not necessary usually, but can't hurt to try it.

[Isidorius]

Took a little fiddling to get the mklink to work (nothing was on C drive, so I had to figure out how to get the command right for E & D drives), but it's set, and I have it set as run as admin/XP compatibility...

And so far? Most of the problem seems to have smoothed out. Not all, still jerks around some, but not nearly as often as it used to, or as badly.. will have to play more extensively to see if the problem persists, gets worse or goes away after the first area, but.. at least it's improvement?

Still not solved completely.. and maybe that's just how the game runs now? I have no idea. But I appreciate the input, doubly so because it seems to have helped!

[♕Gattsu♕]

Installed it a few days ago, run perfectly fine, constant 60 fps. Although i don't play multiplayer. I7 7700 gtx 1080.