Not sure if any of the developers read this though. I have noticed hitches seem to happen at about the same interval, but they usually just last a fraction of a second...however since the update v1.4.6 they seem to freeze the game for about a second. Rolling back to v1.4.5 seems to fix this.

I have an ASUS ROG Strix G15AE, but I force Trails from Zero to run on the integrated graphics @4k (no AA and character glows off but otherwise everything maximum). The CPU is a 5900HX, but that is really just a rebadged Ryzen 7 5700G, so the integrated graphics is the same.

Basically to test this I'll just run around in a loop on any map and Crossbell and then after some time I will get a freeze. While it is possible something in the background is causing this, rolling back to v1.4.5 greatly improves the time of freeze so that is much less noticeable.

Yeah, I have the water shader on, but it doesn't matter if the map does not have water.

Originally I cleared the Shader Cache after I upgraded to 1.4.6 and noticed the freeze (and then rebooted), but it was still present and so I rolled back and noticed the big freeze was gone (a small stutter every now and then, but I've noticed this since Zeroes release).

Now I re-upgraded back to 1.4.6 and for some reason the problem seems to have disappeared. I've attached my CPU & GPU usage while playing the game (though not concurrently) while doing loops around the fountain in Crossbell, but I couldn't get that big freeze to happen again (still some periodic stutter as before but it doesn't seem to show up on the CPU & GPU usage on taskmanager).

EDIT:
I verified the files through GOG, deleted the configuration files, cleared the shader cache and rebooted and it seems to have come back again.

Running the game on the dedicated graphics card (Radeon RX6800M - mobile, lower clocked version of the Radeon 6700XT), runs well as expected and the freezes are gone....

I'm sorry about this flaky report; it's looking like an annoying intermittent issue (likely on my end); I'll try messing around with the settings to see if I can get the game to run smoothly again on the integrated GPU.

1 theory is that GPU 01 has much less video memory. So all the data from the map can't be stored at once. By running around you could be forcing new data to be loaded into video memory from system RAM which is slow.

But if you have a dedicated video card why would you not use that? Power?

That might be a good theory (about the video memory).

I try to use the integrated GPU whenever the game allows for it without any performance degradation. When Zero was first released I found that there was less 'hitching' (even though the framerate was fine on both) on the integrated graphics than the dedicated graphics so I stuck with the integrated GPU (though that doesn't seem to be the case now).

Another reason for using the integrated GPU is that it is usually more silent as the dedicated GPU tends to use more power and so the fans need to ramp up to keep the laptop cool.

I think the problem is looking more likely to be a VRAM issue.

By default my laptop only allocates 512MB to the Vega 8 GPU and it can't be changed without a 3rd party BIOS utility (AMDFormBrowser).

Normally the VRAM usage hovers ~400-500MB in the game (normally low 400's though), but on using the utility to increase the VRAM usage from 512MB to 1024MB it jumped to ~700MB-800MB of VRAM usage in game and I haven't noticed any freezes in a quick test.

I'm going through the entire series again starting from Sky, so it will be a while before I can make sure it is fixed in the long term, but the suggestion about the VRAM was a solid one, so thanks!

I'm glad you may have found a solution.