It's what happens with Ubisoft PC development. They spread themselves out too far and the development process is convoluted causing many issues across a broad range of system configurations.
In recent years it's not typical of PC gaming to ship a game with severe playability issues since most devs can release games with minimal issues across a wide variety of configurations. Ubisoft simply doesn't care enough to QA their games and expect most players to deal with the problems until months after release when they may or may not have the issues resolved. Typical trash development.
I am finding this as well to be an issue. I fixed the maxing out of Core 3 by setting Threaded Optimization to 'On' in the NVCP and forcing the game to run only on Cores 0,2,4,6. This helps spread the load more evenly and stops that particular issue.
The only real issue I have now is a very apparent loading stutter, just like Watch Dogs, and since Watch Dogs was never fixed, it's doubtful it will be fixed here either unless the community is able to step up and fix what Ubisoft refuses to fix.
I don't generally participate in the "trash port" discussions but man your hyperbole is really getting out of hand. Now you're blaming their QA and calling their development trash? Really man.
What do you expect? Hit auto-detect and the game runs at a rock solid fps with no issues? Sure that might happen some time but I can't remember a game I didn't have to or WANT to make some adjustments to get performance that fits me.
My system is similar to yours (i5 2500k @ 4.2, 970, 8 gigs RAM) and guess what? I spent about and hour with my settings, starting at the top then turning things down and making adjustments in the xml until I was happy with my performance. And I'm pleased with the way it runs. No hitching, smooth 60 FPS. Which is more than I can say for games like Battlefield 4 which ran like poop despite getting 120+fps. I had stuttering like crazy that I eventually discovered was due to RTSS conflicting with the Origin overlay (a problem that repeated itself for Dragon Age Inquisition).
Hardware is only the first line of potential issues, then you have drivers, other running software, and in some cases unrealistic expectations of performance.
I empathize with issues that don't seem to be easily solved though so I'll throw a few suggestions out there:
- Try borderless. I saw your post that it just stretches out, mine does that too, I don't know why but hitting ALT-ENTER will snap it in place on your monitor.
- Try disabling the uplay overlay. The game will complain that it requires the overlay for some features but I turned it off anyways
- try the maxBufferedFrames change some people have suggested in the thread
- Turn more settings down. I know it sucks but if your system is getting bogged down, make the sacrifice. When I troubleshoot a game issue I start with everything on LOW then slowly turn up settings until I find a breaking point.
This is an open world, hardware pushing title with some new NVIDIA tech. Tweaking is the name of the game.
Besides I figured the extra ms response time couldn't hurt if I was maintaining the timing/framerate.