should double post this to /r/mildlyinfuriating ... anyway ...
so .... rather annoyingly ... I've stopped copping the pause of death ... the one that's been the thorn in my side for years over this game ... and of course, it came around, by accident ... after I had given up on it ... I've mostly exhausted a VERY long list of cvars, and managed to rule the majority out of being relative to the problem, the 'pauses' would happen no matter what ... and I tried to exacerbate the problem to expose it, but to no avail ...
did any amongst us have to jump through hoops to get the x64 client to run ... I know I did, but that was years ago ... and the accidental solution to my long standing problem reminded me a lot of those battles ... today, for unrelated reasons, I downloaded the cryengine V SDK, and decided I might like to play around with that for a while ... and before long, it became apparent, that I could launch the 'game', the editor would not launch ... eventually I tracked the problem down to a missing file ... with the implication that it should be within the packages that I know I need to have installed to run this in x64 mode ... so eventually I find
https://www.microsof...n.aspx?id=48145, installed it, and then restarted my pc for unrelated reasons ....
on reboot, I prep my normal setup of late ... msi afterburner, OBS for recording, a browser before I want it, a few file explorer windows, MWO, and the sandbox editor, I start watching a video tutorial while searching for a game, attempting to establish the load impact of having the editor open at the same time, played through that game, with no noticeable impact in game from having the second copy ( albeit blank ) copy of crisis running in the background ... played a few more games, while messing with the engine, and all of a sudden I found myself actually quite happy with the frame rates ... and I began to wonder if it was because I was increasing the load on the GPU to be full ...
so I quit the editor, and decided to focus on the game again ... removed adaptive vsync ( that I had been toying with the day before ) and reloaded the game ... on the second game I realised why I was suddenly happy about the frame rates ... the pause at most inconvenient / critical time wasn't happening, and I wasn't getting any increase in frame rates, I was just suffering less stuttering, making the overall amount of frames drawn higher ... so I removed (renamed) my user.cfg and tuning.cfg and went at it for a couple more games .... yep, still no want to punch your screen pauses ... and I'm also noticing less packet 'delay' ... where you jam full acceleration, but don't start moving for at least the latency of your ping time ... my actual latency is the same ....
so I went through and disabled everything that I had done, just to try to force this game to run, like disabling a heap of bios stuff, and forcing the cpu to run at 100% in windows, even the overclock .... all gone ... and so is the primary problem I've had with this thing for years ...
and at this point I should probably eat some of my own words ... because I've pointed the finger, but only been, half right ... I've said, for a long time, that they code badly ... and that's only been half right ... they debug badly ... and that's part of code ... and there are bits that are less than perfect, no doubt, but since the FX's things have always been worse for AMD's ... and it now seems that the problem was at least partially outside of their boundaries and almost certainly outside of their scope, seeing as they have said in the past that they don't test on the AMD's .... which has in effect meant that they don't really test on the x64 version of windows, and the 'best set' of .dll prerequisites is unknown ....
TL DR
(RE!)-download the visual studio redistributable, for a potential 'stuttering' x64 fix
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=48145
I almost feel like I've conquered it, and I can move on to another game (again, but I keep ending up back here, actually I could really go some Kilrathi right about now ) ...