Ahoi people,

I'm in dire need of your help!

Since I started playing Fallout 4, I encountered and still regularly encounter a rather annoying occurance during gameplay: First the sounds go offline (footsteps, guns, V.A.T.S. etc silent), except for music or one particular looping, like Dogmeat barking. This goes on for about 10 to 20 seconds, whereafter the game suddenly freezes for 45 to 120 seconds and then resumes, playing all the accumulated sounds until then at once and "fast-forwarding" through the happenings, 'cause the game apparently "continues" during these freezes. Even the desktop freezes, taskmanager won't work until the game resumes. After the freeze, the game continues as usual. This happens seemingly at random, more often so at some "resourceful" input (opening V.A.T.S., raising the gun, entering a workbench or the main menu) and is particularly annoying! Sometimes this happens few times in a row in a matter of minutes, other times the game runs smooth for half an hour or so.

My specs are:

Win 7 64-bit

Geforce 670 DirectCu II @ 980 Mhz Core and 6.008 Mhz Memory (tried over- and underclocking, to no avail)

AMD Phenom II X6 1050T @ 2.8 Ghz standard clock, 200 Mhz Bus and 2008 Mhz HT Link

8 Gb of G.Skill PC3-10700 DDR3-Ram @ 669 Mhz, standard voltage and latencies

Creative SB X-Fi Titanium PCI Express

Intel SSD 40 gb (effectively 37,5) as the main partition (S.M.A.R.T. says 'all good')

Fallout 4 is located on a rather old Western Digital 1 TB HDD (S.M.A.R.T. says 'all good')

I've tried every official and unofficial tweak (hardware- and software-related) out there so far, but the problem still persists. I double-checked Windows for viruses, faulty registry or faulty drivers, reinstalled nearly all of them. I checked the usage of VRAM and RAM when this happens: Zero hints towards any issue on that front. Only thing I noticed is that the CPU workload drops to zero during the freezes. Furthermore my PC has been producing spikes in latency, therefore lags and massive audio-stutter/hiss when playing anything or watching a video since the installation of Fallout.

This is totally annoying and ruins the game for me, as the randomness of the glitch makes it completely exhilarating.

Can someone point me at some directions and help me out?

Best regards,

Schuchart