u/Ok_Steak2203

Hey everyone, quick rule question:

I was looking into building a team shield like Winston's bubble from Overwatch using Protection + Impervious (Affects Others, Burst Area).

The issue is that most of our characters are already at their Power Level caps for Toughness, so by the rules, this buff does nothing for anyone who is already capped.

Would it break the game if we made a house rule or an extra allowing this shield's Toughness to stack past the PL limits? How do you guys want to handle this?

Been fighting this for a while and wanted to document it in case others are hitting the same wall.

The issue: FPS drops from 80-120 down to as low as 6 during normal traversal, regardless of location. Feels like a hard stall rather than a performance ceiling.

What I've ruled out (tested individually, with hardware monitoring during the worst drops):

• Ray Tracing ON or OFF — no difference
• DX11 vs DX12 — no difference
• Upscaler: TAAU, DLSS Quality, DLSS Balanced — no difference
• All overlays disabled (NVIDIA App, Steam, MSI Center) — no difference
• Mods disabled — no difference
• Fresh GPU driver — no difference
• Forced "High performance" GPU preference in Windows — no difference
• Game files verified — no difference

Hardware monitoring during the worst stutter (FPS 6):

• CPU: 27%
• GPU: 59%
• VRAM: 3.6/8GB
• Disk: 1% active, 4.2ms response time

Nothing is remotely close to its limit. This isn't a hardware bottleneck.

Specs: i9-13900H, RTX 4070 Laptop (8GB), 32GB DDR5-5200 dual channel, NVMe SSD — well above the official "Ultra" requirements. Other games like Dying Light run perfectly smooth on the same machine.

I've opened a ticket with CDPR support (#92565) with video evidence, save file, and DxDiag report. Posting this partly to see if others are experiencing the same pattern (GPU/CPU nowhere near maxed, but severe stutter regardless of settings), and partly to keep a public record in case it helps others troubleshooting the same thing.

Anyone else seeing this specific pattern? Curious if it's tied to a particular game version, area, or something else entirely.