Heavy stuttering

I recently purchased Ashes on its official Steam release. So far I like the game, but there's one issue that's driving absolutely crazy: even though the framerate is steady (as reported by fraps) I find that after a few hundred units are out and about the game starts hitching (stuttering, frame skipping, whatever term you want to use). I'm really hoping it's just something about my system and that this isn't a general fault with the game as the problem drastically decreases the enjoyability of witnessing the games' massive firefights. 

To elaborate: when the problem occurs (it seems to occur every few seconds once it starts) all units (heck, even panning the camera itself) "skip" forward a beat. This includes projectiles/lasers/etc. It's as if a frame or two were just dropped. It gets extremely annoying especially as other RTSes (I'm a huge fan of TA and SupCom) didn't exhibit this behavior.

I've tried everything I could think of (all the obvious stuff like latest drivers, turning off overclocking & running stock speeds, trying dx11/12, turning power management to maximum performance in the Nvidia control panel, enabling/disabling all the vsync types, reducing all in-game graphics settings to low, etc...). I'm hoping someone else ran into this and had a solution... 

Here's my specs:

Intel i5 2500k @ 4.5ghz stable

Nvidia Geforce GTX 970 8GB

8 GB DDR3 RAM 2133, PC17000

Game is installed on a SSD

Windows 10

Outside of the hitching effect, the game seems to run just fine.