Since so far I've rarely run into games that wouldn't run smoothly on my current rig (with the exception of The Witcher 3), I was naive enough to buy this game without checking system requirements. Now, it looks like my PC is meeting the minimum system requirements (Win 8.1, i5 3GHz, GTX660, 8GB RAM) but that doesn't seem to be enough for an enjoyable experience, at least not at the default graphics settings (and my native resolution 1680*1050).

Loading times are very long and while I can move freely, there's frequent stuttering in the animations, short freezes and lag before displays appear or new areas come into view etc. Just no fun to play it that way.

There are quite a few graphics options in the menu, but no explanation what they do and how they affect performance, and I'm not that tech-savvy. Does anyone have any advice what I could try to make the game run smoothly?

Decreasing the texture size seems to help a lot, at least that's what did it for me. You can also take a look at the debug-menu (somewhere in the options), there is an option to show the current/max/min framerate at the corner of the screen - that has helped me a lot with optimizing the settings.

Yes, decreasing the texture size helped quite a bit, thanks! There's still stuttering right at the beginning when the camera zooms on Tilo sleeping on the bunk, but in-game movement seems to be more or less fluid now.

1. Try to disable vSync from the game menu and see if you get any improvement in performance or smoothness like that. If you do notice less or none stuttering then the in-game vSync could be at fault. Try enabiling vSync or Fast Sync from the nVIdia control panel and use riva tunner to limit your framerate to 60fps and test it.

2. If that didn't help, try reducing the game settings to its absolute minimum, test it and see how much headroom you get, so can then try raising the settings one by one to see which one affects performance the most.

3. Your last option would be limiting the game to 30fps, that usually gives you enough headroom to raise your settings and resolution a bit.