alright, i stumbled upon the solution. As my specs indicate, im using one of the newer 12th gen Intel cpus that have the P-cores and E-cores and this issue has been ongoing since the system was built (my old system did not use a 12th gen cpu). I was watching my per core usage and notice that my e cores would spike in usage. Well apparently during the cpus normal core shuffle (games don't run on the same core all the time, the process is moved around) it would be shuffled to an e-core then off the e-core. The e-cores are clocked far slower than the E-cores. After setting my game process affinity to only use P-cores, the issue vanished. Unsure of why the windows scheduler thinks it's a good idea to move a game from a p-core to an e-core then back to a p-core. Thanks for everyone who helped, and i hope if someone stumbles across this thread that it helps you.