Unplayable due to framerate, video-, physics, and audio bugs

[SirCocksalot420]

Just got Fallen Order and was appalled... either it's extremely poorly optimised or my pc has some sort of special hatred just for this game.

While I don't meet the recommended specs, I'm well above the minimum ones:

i5-4690, 16gb;

geforce 960, 4gb

Fallen Order is the only game I've ever had such problems with performance; other games run consistently at at least 40 fps when I tweak the settings down a bit, things like gta5, far cry5, assassin's creed unity, sekiro, they all run perfectly smoothly if I don't overdo it with graphical settings - this one stutters like I'm trying to play on a 10 year old laptop.

I tried running this game in native 1920x1080 with all settings on medium but the framerate never went above 15 when I did, it would mostly just give me a new frame every second or two.

I closed all programs in the background that could be eating performance, I raised the game's priority, set it to performance mode wherever I could and tried several other fixes propagated by people online. the best I could come up with (after all the fiddling with settings and 3rd party programs) was lowering the resolution to 1366x768. it kind of wiggles its way up to a relatively solid 30-40 fps but only if I remain in one area for a while - as soon as something new needs to be loaded, it's back to 5 second freezes and wonking between 3 and 15 fps. Slides (which this game enjoys a whole lot, apparently) are complete coin tosses - the first 3 - 5 times depending on the slide are pretty much guaranteed to have me take damage because the performance falls into the toilet when something (especially me) moves quickly, before I have been down half of it and it's had time to load there is nothing I could possibly do.

Characters (myself included) are launched about, even fall through the floor if there's a lot going on (falling through the train floor as cal got up in the very beginning almost softlocked my game - I respawned without a lightsabre and had to reload from the menu), cutscenes stutter in both video and audio, even the EA logo in the beginning and the meditation screen as I load into the game have massive stutters. it's completely impossible to fight anything right after entering an area because performance gets so bad you can't only not react to whatever is supposed to be going on, the framedrops actually eat my inputs. after I stay in an area for 2-3 minutes it goes up to endurable levels but as soon as I move on it's back to unplayable.

My ram is doing A-OK at no more than 45% but my cpu is pretty much never lower than 80% when I'm in game. strangely enough the cpu spikes to 100 do not coincide with the massive performance drops, the opposite rather: the few moments my cpu usage went below 50% were the ones with massive lag.

This is extremely frustrating tbh, I payed for the game which has had quite some time for bugfixes, performance optimisation, etc., checked system requirements, and expected a playable, maybe even enjoyable game. instead I got 3 hours of wasting my time on forums, one hour of fiddling around with in game- and PC settings, and it all amounted to pretty much nothing.

Hope it gets fixed soon, or, if it really is me or my pc - someone tells me what I'm doing wrong/what the issue is. I'm at the end of my rope here - it's a great game, I love everything from visuals to sound design, from characters to plot, from combat to exploration but I won't be sacrificing time and patience like that anymore. a playable game is all I want.