If someone finds this post, the issue seems to be that my audio jack at the back of my motherboard was getting spikes of current/had an unstable signal. This was causing the audio to stutter, but somehow also affected the game itself. I even noticed this out of game while playing music on Youtube, I had a game downloading which used my CPU, and the audio stuttered.
I switched my headphones (wired) and speakers to a Behringer XENYX 502 audio interface and that connects via USB. All my audio routes through this now, and I have not had any stutters in-game or otherwise.
