Like many, I too am fed up with the PC version and am going to just play on Xbox until (or if) they patch PC version.
I can lock to 30 and it's smooth(as much as 30fps can be) but the input lag ruins the experience immensely. None of the "fixes" work for me on this aspect. Coupled with the awful wheel support, racing against the bewildering AI is nigh on impossible.
Switch to 60FPS/unlocked and the gameplay is a night and day difference. The game feels so much faster and it actually reacts to my inputs, wow! The problem is it stutters with the frequency of a severe Tourette's sufferer.
What's even more depressing is that driving becomes significantly easier when you can actually react to the car's physics, and the game becomes fun again despite the AI's best efforts to disprove several well established fundamental laws of nature. Unfortunately the frequent stuttering is very distracting and can sometimes be difficult to steer through - especially in race events where the stuttering is at its most frequent.
The more I probe into the settings, my hardware and various %load and frametime graphs as well as everyone's responses here, the more I fear that a fully working patch is a long time off. I hope to be proved wrong.
At 30FPS capped (whether in game or via NI) my CPU Core and GPU usage are roughly 60-70% across the board. No mater what I change settings wise, this doesn't seem to change.
If I set it to 60/Unlimited, suddenly my hardware comes alive, and we are hitting 95-100% load as you would expect. I can now sit at a constant 60FPS and...it stutters. I can stand still and the cars around me will stutter as they drive by. That is not a streaming issue in my mind. Still, I am on a 970 and with the game sometimes hitting over 3.5GB of RAM usage I think perhaps the infamous 0.5GB of slow memory on the 970 is causing the issue. Lowering the settings - mainly the 3 environment details - gets me a nice manageable 3GB of VRAM usage. And yet the incessant stuttering continues on it's ever diligent mission to keep fun at bay.
My system specs are:
i5 2500K @ 4.8GHz
GTX 970 - OC'd to 1533MHz
8GB RAM
1080P
In my (uneducated) opinion, the stuttering is a inherent issue which occurs regardless of settings, and is only made less or more obvious depending on the settings, and the power of your rig. It's also somewhat temperamental based purely on the weather and time of day based on some of the reports here.. and I'm not talking about the in game weather. I think this is why the input lag exists at 30FPS. The game is still stuttering, but the VSYNC and framerate smoothing mask it, but your inputs get delayed or ignored because behind the scenes, the game is skipping a beat. On screen are frames that are outdated and possibly interpolated.
Regardless, what I think is irrelevant. It is plain to see for everyone in this thread that the game is not ready for PC. What concerns me is that this is Microsoft's second big release they have pushed to the Windows store and the second big release to suffer for it. Quantum Break had an excuse, it was the first AAA game released on the store; the store was in its infancy and Microsoft was adamant that it could overcome these teething issues. Now FH3 is being crushed by the same fate and I fear for Gears of War 4.
Microsoft's renewed push into the PC gaming community is something I really appreciate, but their apparent urgency to do so is leaving a lot to be desired. The adage 'under promise and over deliver' comes to mind and I shouldn't need to repeat Shigeru Miyamoto's now famous quote.
Apologies for the wall of text, I tried to be succinct. I just needed to vent my frustration.
