Poor performance post year 1550, am I alone?

[serivahn]

Does anyone else experience a significant amount of stuttering starting around 1550?
I typically play on 4/5 speed, but the stuttering eventually gets unbearable.
To the extent where I usually stop playing before year 1700 because I can't tolerate the performance degradation.
Restarting the game makes it go away temporarily, but it always comes back within 10 minutes or so.

I can't post a DX diag because I am at work, but my computer stats are roughly:

1. Intel Core i7 processor with 8 cores
2. AMD Radeon HD7850
3. Windows 8 64 bit
4. Realtek sound, nothing special
5. 1TB hard drive, again nothing special -- 7200RPM I think?
6. 750W Power supply
7. 8gb Ram (good quality)

All of my drivers are up to date and my computer has a high end cooling system installed.
Changing most graphics options has almost no effect, though I have found disabling rivers and reflection helps.
Overclocking mitigates the issues but not by much.

Its capable of running "Total War : Rome 2" on extreme settings.
I would rather be playing EU4 though.

Are there other ways of further mitigating this issue?

 

[AndrewT]

Are you using any mods?

please post a dxdiag.txt (you can delete everything after the "Sound devices" section for brevity), settings.txt, system.log and error.log files (you'll need to rename the .log files to .txt to upload). Also open setup.log, search for "checksum", and paste that line only in here.