Stuttering frequently on highest and lowest settings.

Same for me, stutter everywhere, if i play  the sames stage agin after finishing it, it sttuters less ,but still stutter, no matter what rally or stage, same across the game.  

My specs: AMD ryzen 9 5900hx, 16gb ram, Radeon RX 6800M gddr6 12GB, 1TB ssd

I have played about three hours of this game now (Steam version) after installing the new 546.01 graphics driver from NVIDIA for my RTX 4080 last night. I will say that the game is mostly good and I have been enjoying it but there are clearly issues that need fixing which currently tarnish the game, specifically the stuttering and some weird graphical issues.

I have found that of the 8 or 9 stages that I played since last night that the stuttering appears to be related to specific effects, such as driving through water for the first time, which causes a splash and a huge frametime spike and stutter, or crashing into rocks and so, which damages the car and also generated particle effects. These only happen the first time on a track and if you restart or replay it then they are cached for the second time and so don't cause stuttering.

There also appear to traversal stutters, which occur in the same parts of the stage, either causing a hitch or a period where the framerate just drops, in my case below 60 fps which I can immediately feel. I know these are traversal stutters because these occur in the same place each time and never go away.

I tested this on the shakedown stages of certain tracks by the way as these are one minute portions of the main stages, so can be completed quickly, and can also be done up to 5 times per stage.

So, yes, WRC is a good game, perhaps not the graphical evolution over DiRT Rally 2.0 that I was hoping for when I thought it was using Unreal Engine 5, but it is sadly tarnished by stuttering. Stutter, even one instance of it, is a no-no in any racing game as it can not only impair the control response but it can cause a momentary lose of concentration and result in you crashing (which is frustrating when there's no rewind feature and the stage is long). Hopefully, the developers can address the shader and traversal stutter but I suspect that the traversal stutter will not be fixed as I understand that this even happens on the consoles.

Oh and the graphical glitches I saw after installing the new graphics driver last night were some glitchy LODs on rock faces that were switching as my car literally drove past them rather than far off in the distance. I also saw the background flicker on and off once during the same stage (it was an early Career event, Sweden I think). There is also an issue with the way the car lights work in dark stages that makes the road surface look weirdly shimmery and also makes overhead cables look very blocky and aliased (jaggy).

I am playing at 1440p using DLSS Quality on completely maxed out settings, that is not the Ultra preset but the a custom one with Reflections, Mirrors and Shadows set to Ultra as the Ultra preset only sets those to High.

Hey there,

The Game team is aware that there are some points where the game hitches or stutters and this is being investigated. Thank you for your report and your videos. I will give you more information as soon as I have an update.

 -Groguet

You can clearly see the issue in your video, same issue I have and I think it's the same for all 🙂 Thanks!

Wanted to give an update after a little more testing.

Saw someone elsewhere suggest disabling DLSS (and avoiding all other Upscaling options as well) and the large frame time spikes and severe stutters dropped off for the most part (still around 5-10 total during a stage), but there were still smaller stutters and microstutters happening a lot of the time instead.

On the frame time graph it went from this constantly (using DLSS): 

to this (No Upscaling):

and this (No Upscaling) :

Even these minor frame time spikes / microstutters are still enough to interfere with your driving, and Gsync doesn't smooth out these hitches showing this is more than just minor framerate variations and performance drops but rather some technical hitch, although it's not nearly as brutal as before.

I don't know if the upscaling methods in game are currently busted or if they are just exacerbating the underlying stuttering issue making them more obvious when they occur, but yeah.

I know this tip won't help console users, but if you are playing on PC, give it a shot. It went from unplayable to nearly playable here.