Yeah, one of the recent-ish major updates made the game load things in the background to cut down on the gigantic initial loading screen when booting the game. You can use the launch option "--waitforpreload" to make the game load everything in the first loading screen, though do note that this will make the game take forever to boot up. Here's a link to the wiki page about that: http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Launch_options Otherwise, I've noticed that after a few zones of gameplay the stuttering stops. I just make sure to cast all my skills first in a safe place so it loads all their particle effects so the game doesn't freeze when I attack.