I was playing the quest 'The Hunt'. I had just finished the braindances and went back to dialog with River. I still had the notification at the top of the screen saying "scanner out of range". I recognized this as a potential bug, and when it did not go away I decided to quicksave and reload.

Now, when I load the game the screen begins to stutter, and the load screen radio dialog stutters. When in the game I can sometimes play for a minute or two, until eventually the game locks up. If I press escape and wait for the menu to come up, eventually the game will "catch up" and I can play like normal for another minute, more or less, until it stutters and locks up again.

I tried loading earlier saves, and creating an entire new character to see if it is save files. The game stutters even on character creation. I have tried lowering all graphical options to minimum from high/medium settings, turning off HDR, lowering resolution, turning off my second monitor, verifying game files, and reinstalling the game on a different hard drive. Nothing has worked yet.

I will try turning off all overlays and rolling back nvidia drivers when I get off work. Any other ideas would be appreciated.

i7 5930k
32gb RAM
1080ti

TLDR; Game itself locks up with stutters constantly after previously running smoothly for 50 hours of campaign. Menus, character creation, save files, loading screens all affected. No idea why or what caused it.

I'm beginning to wonder if all these bugs are built into a table and there's a random roll on a timer every so often to see if it screws you or not.

I sometimes play for 5 minutes before a crash, sometimes for several hours.
Always hard crashes in the end, taking down the video driver and requiring a restart. :-(

lol right on the nose!

Huh ya know when I had that problem, is when I tried turning down the tunings in my graphics card control program.
When I put it back on gaming mode (balanced), it went back to working smoothly.

Have you checked your graphics card control program?
Maybe it's set on low performance/quiet mode ?

Appreciate the input, I'll definitely try checking MSI afterburner as well. As far as I know everything should be set to stock settings.

Good luck!

That is incredibly frustrating. Did Windows apply any updates recently?

No.
So long as your drivers are up to date and you have no hardware failures... it's the game.

... and yeah I'm frustrated too.
I'm sure their doin their best to fix it.

No major updates from windows.

Used DDU to uninstall video drivers, did a clean install of nvidia driver to 460.79. Game stability was restored. I turned the nvidia overlay back on and tried turning on "instant replay" and it wrecked my game again, as soon as I turned it off the game resumed normal operation.

So for anybody reading this that is having problems, I highly recommend checking overlays and turning them off. Nvidia overlay is definitely messing with the game, xbox game bar overlay for pc seemed to be ok but I'll probably turn it off too, gog overlay doesn't work for me, haven't tried steam's but I imagine it's ok.

edit: Unfortunately you can't tag your own posts as solutions but this post did solve my problem.