Performance tweaks

I am running an AMD Ryzen 9800X3D and RTX 4070 Ti and never had any performance issues with any games. However, certain maps (not just in the new DLC) were just crawling.

Here are some AI suggestions that helped resolve most of my issues. I think the resolution match and options.txt thread fix helped. I did everything except the CPU affinity.

The bad news is that the lag you're seeing is largely the update itself, not your configuration: many long-time players report severe stuttering and performance drops only after the recent patch and DLC. The update amped up the rendering quality, so your old "everything maxed" settings are now heavier than they used to be.

In-game video settings

Shader Quality: High (not Very High) — this is the single biggest win; players found lowering shader quality restored performance after the update even though Very High was fine before (Steam Community)

Deferred Rendering: ON — it uses extra graphics memory to cut draw calls per frame by ~30%, with the biggest gains in complex scenes, and you have VRAM to spare.

Display mode: Exclusive Fullscreen — borderless window causes stuttering for some players after the update while fullscreen runs smoothly (Steam Community)

V-Sync: OFF (cap FPS via NVIDIA Control Panel/App instead, e.g., a few frames under your refresh rate) — some players eliminated stutter simply by turning v-sync off (Steam Community)

Double-check your resolution matches your monitor's native res — one player's micro-stutter was entirely caused by the update defaulting the resolution to something odd (Steam Community)

Everything else (textures, shadows, particles, reflections, AA) you can leave at High/Very High; your GPU isn't the constraint. Depth of Field is personal taste — many turn it off.

Outside the game, in rough order of payoff

Edit Documents\My Games\Grim Dawn\Settings\options.txt: set forceSingleProcessorMode = false and maxResourceThreads to your core count (8 for you). This is a classic fix for stutter when moving/rotating the camera.

Try the CPU affinity trick — the Grim Dawn CPU Affinity fix resolves stuttering for most players. Manually: Task Manager → Details → Grim Dawn.exe → Set Affinity, and try limiting it to physical cores only (or odd-numbered cores, plus setting priority to High, which one Ryzen user swears by). (Steam Community)

Make sure GPU drivers are current, and disable the Steam overlay for the game if you use Discord/Steam overlays.

Verify game files in Steam — some players had settings silently reset by the update, so it's worth confirming everything actually stuck.

Set expectations accordingly: some of the post-DLC stutter appears to be engine-side and Crate will likely need to patch it. But shader quality down one notch + fullscreen + the options.txt thread fix resolves it for the majority of people with hardware like yours.