Hey, sorry for the necro but (at least in my specific case) I found the exact issue that was causing this. I’m shocked I even found it because it’s something you’d never expect would cause issues like this.
I wanted to investigate more because I realized that the freeze-ups weren’t just affecting UE4/UE4 games, but also BeamNG.drive which runs on a completely different engine. After checking the task manager, I realized wlansvc.exe (WLAN AutoConfig) was eating up nearly 20% of my cpu usage. Was wondering why, until I looked at the program that was invoking it. It was a Belkin N150 (F9L1001v1) WiFi adapter driver that was constantly and repeatedly invoking Windows’s network config service because it couldn’t find the adapter it was looking for… one that I stopped using over 4 years ago. Why it started doing this just in June? Probably because that’s when I switched to ethernet and stopped using a wifi adapter at all, might’ve just confused it or something (keep in mind I am not very knowledgeable about windows drivers or how it’s network stuff works so this could be wrong).
The fix for it in my case was to simply stop wlansvc.exe (the only thing using it at the time was the belkin driver), go to the path for it in Program Files and just… well… delete it. There are probably safer ways of doing this but since I have no intention of using this adapter again, nor do I even have it anymore, I didn’t mind doing this. And sure enough, the lag spikes stopped happening. In fact, this driver was causing some severe lag on my system because after some further investigation it seems that running any performance-intensive games on my computer can cause it to start going wild. Not sure how there is possibly any type of connection here, but it’s the behavior I observed between the driver and wlansvc, and deleting the driver solved my issue entirely.
The chances of this exact problem being the cause for anyone else’s lag here is really low, but I encourage everyone who’s still having issues like mine (as I’ve seen people mention in the past), to look for old drivers from old devices or generally just to look around as it’s most likely your system and not Tower (as mac originally said).
EDIT: After a bit more testing, this seems to have even fixed the issue I had with walking on certain surfaces.
Again, I have no idea whatsoever how the drivers for a really old wifi adapter can connect to lag spikes when walking on different, specific surfaces of a game and am frankly quite confused but uhh… it works fine now?