After further testing, I noticed something interesting:
When hosting a Portal match privately (local host), the issue does not occur at all — Time Smoothing remains stable, no CPU desync, and gameplay feels perfectly responsive.
However, the problem only appears in online multiplayer modes, even on low-ping servers.
This strongly suggests that the issue is tied to something specific in the live multiplayer environment, rather than hardware or system settings.
At this point, it seems very likely that the cause could be related to server-side systems — possibly the anti-cheat, player state validation, or other background synchronization features introduced in the release build.
It would be great if EA/DICE could investigate whether any of these new online systems are interfering with the CPU timing or interpolation pipeline, since the BETA and private-hosted sessions didn’t show this behavior at all.
