I found some threads on Reddit talking about this issue, and they mentioned hardware acceleration on other programs potentially causing the issue. I turned it off on Discord and Firefox, and my game went from chain freezing every 15 seconds to running just fine.

I had this issue on release and never found a fix, but it seemingly fixed itself as it stopped happening for a few months. It came back even worse after the 7.1 update though, so I'm not exactly sure what's going on with the game.

Dawntrail changes to the game's code may have resulted in the game not playing nice with other programs utilizing the graphics card.