The fix

No amount of fiddling with in-game settings made a significant difference to stop the stutters. The only way to make the game run smoothly is through editing config files.

1) Navigate to this path:
Steam\steamapps\common\Call of Duty Advanced Warfare\players2

2) With a text editor. Open config.cfg
e. x. Notepad++

3) Search for the line "seta r_videoMemoryScale" and set it to anything between "0.8" and "0.9"
e. x.

Why this might help

Lowering available VRAM might sound counter-intuitive, but the game is not managing its resources properly and doesn't leave headroom for commonly occurring heavy tasks.
For that reason we only allow the game to use 80-90% of our VRAM.
Goal is to not allow your GPU to constantly work at 100%.

Note: If you have around 4GB of VRAM, you might want to try an even lower %

What to expect

Hopefully this time when you see a high framerate it will actually feel like it.
Do note that the game still has terrible optimization issues, especially at a few key in-game loading areas, crashes are still common no matter how good your hardware is.

When reaching those heavy areas there will either be massive framedrops anywhere from 10s to a couple minutes or you'll just crash. I replayed some missions 2-3 times and the stutters and crashes repeated in the same spots, with a few anomalies(random crash)


Decided to post this because the game is out for years and there's no mention of this fix.
If this did nothing, look at the other guides. I'm posting what helped me personally and couldn't be found in other Steam guides.
Hope it helps, good luck.