Alright, where to start. First, I suspect Funcom is at least aware of this, but I’ll do my due diligence in reporting.
Per the Steam user, Fampat, who made a post here, there is a possible connection with UE4 Garbage Collection settings causing some of the stuttering that people experience.
What is Garbage Collection? Well if you are interested, you can read about it here., and if you scroll down on this link you can read about the various settings that we see in the DefaultEngine.ini. Essentially though, Garbage Collection helps keep your memory clear as the game runs (from what little I understand anyhow).
Now the interesting tidbit is that, via some light Google research, Garbage Collection and hitching with UE4 in general has been an on going issue in several versions of UE4 now. What that means for Conan Exiles, I have no idea, I’m not a coder, I just know that this is a general problem in UE4 across the board (not sure if it’s been solved in the latest versions of UE4 either.). And no, before you ask, Funcom can’t just update the game engine even if that was a reasonable fix. That would take MONTHS of transition work from the UE4 version that Conan Exiles uses to the latest version. Maybe even a year, not to mention the millions of dollars in costs.
Now for the test, per Fampat on Steam. Before you do this test though, please be aware that I don’t honestly know what disabling this does long term. This should only be done on a test save to be safe, but it’s your call. I only tested this on single player, I don’t know if severs have a similiar option or if it’s client side only.
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Navigate to → Steam\steamapps\common\Conan Exiles Client\ConanSandbox\Config\DefaultEngine.ini
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Find the section, [/Script/Engine.GarbageCollectionSettings]
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Change gc.BlueprintClusteringEnabled=True to gc.BlueprintClusteringEnabled=False
I tested on single player, in a save that has no buildings at all. What I noticed is that in the usual spots I always get the stutter/hitches, I still got them (though they may have been lessoned some). But what I didn’t get was after I ran over the spots again, instead of the consistant hitches in those spots I’ve always gotten (like in Fampart’s sample video of the problem), they didn’t come back.
Edit:
Ignasis response below with additional information: