[2020] Is It Too Much To Ask?

Look, I'm old. 55 years old. I work all day, come home, exercise, make dinner for my wife and I and do the dishes, and most evenings for the last 3 years, I play a bit of PUBG. I'm not real good, because, like I'm said, I'm old, and you start to get slower. But I love this stupid game, more than I've loved any video game since I played PONG back in the mid 70s. All I wanna do is relax a bit. You know, forget about the end of the goddamned world that's barrelling down on us, just for an hour or so.

But I can't, not since Patch 8.0, because of tHe ConSTaNT sTUtUTtTering anD hhIHihITcHINg. Which since 8.1 has become stuttering, hitching, massive freaking frame rate drops, and 1-3 second total lockups. Which happen, oddly (NOT ODDLY! I AM BEING IRONIC!) around the time the first bot spawns in, disappear a bit when there are no bots around me, and reappear in spades as soon as there are one or more within (theoretical) line of sight. There may well be (there probably are) other causes, but this is the one I can clearly identify.

This didn't happen to me during Season 7 (well it did, but it was minor stutters, and only mildly annoying, rather than full-on game-breaking). Nothing on my PC has changed since other than, like me, it's old and getting older (i5-3570K, GTX970). So somebody done screwed up somewhere I'm pretty sure.

Is it too much to ask to just be able to play this game I bought back in June of 2017 and have put a couple thousand hours into? That I've bought every damn season pass for, not because I care about skins, but because I want to support its development? That I swear by all that's holy is going to give me a coronary embolism if this keeps up?

Because it doesn't feel like too much to ask, friendos. To play this game, even with the kind of performance we had a year ago fer chrissakes, for a while. You know, before the rage makes my heart explode.

I'm at the point of begging here. Please fix it. Do an old man a solid.

Edit: thanks for the upvotery, everyone. All I wanted (other than to vent a bit) was for PUBG Corp folks to see this and understand the pain a lot of us are feeling. That's a mission accomplished, I reckon.

Edit 2: My friends, it seems like (for the moment at least, because PUBG things don't always stay fixed) that my long nightmare might be over. I just played three rounds on Miramar, almost entirely stutter free, and things felt snappier than they have for me for 10 months. Solid 55-60fps, too.

Here's what I did:

1. Install Patch 8.2 because duh.
2. Run ISLC because I figured it was time to give it a try. Set it to 512Mb/512Mb because that's what the developer recommends for 8Gb RAM.
3. Raise most of my graphics settings, because some madman here in this thread recommended it and it seemed just crazy enough to work.

Things might well go bad again, but: feels good, man. At least right now. If everything else was just placebo, and it was the new patch that did the trick: thanks PUBG Corp, sincerely. I hope others have having similarly improved experiences.