Thanks for the response, I appreciate you taking time to look at it. This is gonna be another long post of me but perhaps the information in it could bring up new ideas.

To answer your question first. No the issue happens very randomly. So I could not really notice an effect in the frequence of it. It does seem to appear a bit more the longer a battle goes on. However I also do have battles where the hiccup does not appear at all, yet then the next battle it could. Also seems to happen a bit more when letters/text come up in combat like critical/frozen/weak etc etc.

Example:

When I hit an enemy that has poison with fire weapons you get these explosions. I can hit the enemy for like 4-5 times with the explosion going off directly every time I hit. Yet in the same battle another enemy is in a poison cloud. So I throw a flare in to let the cloud explode, and it can go like this little delay/stutter/hiccup i do not know how to call it, but it is really noticable. it is not like BOOM but B..O..OM. The example can happen the other way arround as well.

At that very moment I see the FPS counter drop from 120 to like 101 for just 1 second and instantly back to 120 again. When I am exploring areas (lets take the crowded cyseal town) it is constant 120 fps, so it is only in battle. Camera movement is smooth as well. So again it happens only in combat even when I keep my screen steady and just watch the battle go on.


Now I do have another assumption since i tried so many things already. Could it be a combination with the sound (perhaps my motherboard or bad sound drivers?) and stuff going off in battle (like the characters saying something when they crit) and the crit text flying in? Reason why I think of sound is that I had a location (I think it was luculla forest at spiders north) all sound in combat like just went out... like pop all gone. So I alt-tabbed to check if others sounds still worked and they did.
Eventually the sound did came back after the battle was over.

I will try the suggestion you did with a clean boot and the other user account later today.