My system spec are pretty much identical to yours, with only 2 exceptions, i have windows 7 and use a 970 gtx

To clarify the game run mostly fine here, as mostly i mean some relatively rare slowdown for a few moments when everything, and i mean everything, chain explode like in a michel bay movie

There are only two things that come to midn for your spec

- Windows 10, it's known to have problem with this (and some others) game(s), others users in this thread have similar problem to yours or even worse with constant crashing, and as only difference from rig where the game work fine is the os

- Some newest nvidia cards drivers are somewhat problematic, and could very well be the cause of your issues, yourself wrote that such problems where not present with your 960, so driver are a pretty good bet

Only thing i can suggest is:

1) Download a use the lastest available version of Display Driver Uninstaller:
https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html

Clean up all your drivers, possibly in safe mode, and reinstall, it helped me in the past with some quite weird issue i had with my 970, also be sure to have manually downloaded the lastest drivers and hotfix if avaible, don't use the automatic nvidia bull####, it's just trash

2) Disable all nvidia drivers from taskmanager if solution 1 is insufficient, i speaking of "nvvsvc.exe" and "nvxdsync.exe"

Make sure that no nvidia program/service is running, including "NVIDIA Display Driver Service", in windows 7 is under task manager the service control manager, the table at the right side of process and then the buttun at the bottom right

Disabling this program/service may help if the driver are interfering, i had this problem with witcher 3, it was crashing randomly till i disabled everything, and finally i could play more then 40 min without being booted up to desktop

Fair warning, while disabling nvidia service and programs can help solving driver specific issues, it may also slowdown certain games, those services and program do something useful, when they work properly, so use this solution only as a last resort attempt

As a last note, 100% prefect running on this game, SW2, is impossible without an extremely powerful CPU right now, this is because the game verify all damage applied to items and creatures, player included, using a single instructions, a big no no in most circumstances as it prevent proper optimization for multi-threading and thus causing inevitable slowdowns in some situations as only 1 core at time can access the same instruction in the same instant

AMD based CPU suffer from this more visibly then Intel, albeit it's not really noticeable with the 8320e most of the time, i know as i have the same CPU

Try running in full screen window mode instead of full screen. I have a much smoother experience on my 1080 when I do this, my AMD 390X is fine in both modes.

Apologies for not responding when the solution was found. Turns out, stupidly enough, that it was Google Chrome making the game run poorly. I can't think of any other game I play that shares this issue, so I didn't even think about it. I appreciate both of your helps!