When I ran into this too, it drove me nuts. For me, lowering shadows and post-processing gave me the biggest jump ever. One more thing to note is that the background apps can affect it too. I found Discord overlay alone was eating frames and the small tweaks I did really add up.
It is amazing just how much background apps can use on a PC and not realise that they can cause a lot of issues when it comes to dropped frames or even lag on your game.
I found Discord was a big issue, just as you did, and closing that solved a lot of the issues I was having with any games I played.
Same here shadows were the biggest culprit for me too. I also disabled replays and turned off motion blur which helped a ton. You should Check your power settings in Windows make sure it's on high performance not balanced. And yeah,close everything unnecessary running in the background. Even Chrome with a bunch of tabs can tank your FPS.
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