Microstuttering + choppy, skipping frametimes

Okay, so I seem to have found a working solution for this. Fiddled around with the CPU affinity trick and some other settings, and I've been able to find a combination of settings that allowed me to have three 1h+ sessions with no stuttering, a perfect, constant 60 fps and no game freezes in the last couple of days. It also seems to simultaneouly solve the problems with skipping/stuttering/crackling audio that is likely the result of the same issue.

Alt-tabbing out of the game when it's been running for a few minutes in the main menu and turning off the first CPU core  (CPU 0) in the game's CPU Affinity settings in Task Manager while leaving the rest active is indeed the fix that solves the issue. Keep in mind that this is apparently the very same bug that the original HP2010 had on PCs (at least the Steam version), so the Remaster just carried over this issue and it's likely a part of the game's core code. I really hope and urge the EA representatives on this forum to forward this issue to the dev team, as it's a 10-year old bug that hasn't been properly addressed, even though it's well documented on various online forums.

Other settings: 

- Power usage in in Nvidia Control Panel's profile for the game: High Performance (might be a placebo, but I'll just leave it as such)

- in Launch Options for the game in Steam's Library, I put '-high' (High CPU priority for the Steam version of the game)

- Borderless Windowed mode in-game

- Vsync On in-game (didn't force it through Nvidia CP)

- Max quality graphics preset in-game

The best part is that the secondary problem with the game totally locking up after 10-15 minutes while using the CPU affinity solution is apparently also gone, but I'm not sure what party of my toying with different other settings solved it. It might have been the High CPU priority launch option in Steam, as I'm pretty sure that after adding it, I've had no further issues. If you don't have the Steam version of the game, maybe try increasing the game's CPU Priority from Normal to High or Real-time in Task Manager (besides unchecking the CPU 0 core in Affinity).

Overall, while the game is now very enjoyable and I can finally start playing it properly, I really feel like PC players shouldn't be expected to try all these ad-hoc solutions themselves, and for the Remaster to be plagued by the same obvious technical issue that the original game had a decade ago.