My dad bought it for himself and I'm trying to fix it for him and nothing I do works. If it actually gets into the game it runs at a smooth framerate, but the problem comes in the pre-rendered cutscenes. They stutter like crazy and frequently just freeze and crash the game. Is there any fix to this? Is it a known issue? I can't really find anything about how to fix it.

Turn off shader preloading during cutscenes in the options.

@driam: I tried that. It's still choppy and freezes during the loading screen scenes. It it manages to get past the prerendered scenes the game runs perfectly.

Tried running the game in borderless windowed mode instead of full screen? Saw some people say that helped them.

@driam: I got it to stop stuttering and freezing in the cutscenes, but now it just constantly crashes at random.

That's AW for you

Does your dad have an AMD card? A lot of reports were coming out around launch with the exact problems he's having, from people with AMD cards.

@doctordonkey: No it's a Nvidia card.

Maybe try reinstalLing it? Are your drivers up to date?

This is what happens when a developer go to the console version click "save as pc version". Then release it without testing it.

In the old days this would be my response. Somehow the game would be corrupt.

@bybeach: I've reinstalled it twice and made sure all my drivers are up to date.

At first I got an error about something being corrupt but after reinstalling it, it just crashes

Welcome to PC gaming, pretty much. Something in the hardware configuration or software of your dads computer is interfering with the game in a way the developers didn't anticipate. At this point your only option is to painfully go through the process of testing each and every component and possibly reinstalling windows to clear all driver conflicts from past unclean driver removals - although before you get there you'll probably reach the point where it's not worth it and just write the whole thing off as a loss.

I have the excact same thing happening on a GTX 970, the CPU usage just hits 100% in the beginning of the cutscene, even though I turned off the shader pre load. Audio goes out of sync and it's a mess. Same thing is wrong with CoD Ghosts for me. I just wanna see that virtua Spacey.

Badly maintained PC's are the best.

It's not really badly maintained. It was just reformatted last week.

Whats the specs on the hardware?

Now it's giving him a disc read error even though it's on steam.

Turning off preload made everything work great for me on a 970 w/ a i7 4970k..

Before that the cutscenes were horrible though... always losing sync and being incredibly stuttery

That's not disc in the optical media sense of the word. That's on "oh shit this hard drive might be on it's way out" situation.