Would you mind expanding on how this improves hitreg? I've seen so much back and forth on the subject and have my own (very) anecdotal testing that I just don't know what to believe anymore.

Most of those posts were directed at me

https://puu.sh/ynXYj/95125e3f66.jpg

Speaking of that thread can anyone make sense of these posts:

I had no idea what this meant when he was blabbing at me and still have no clue where he's getting "970 ticks per interval" from.

Thanks for the reply.
I've checked out CPU usage and it's not being throttled. Back when I first put this machine together I made sure there wasn't any weird stuff going on with throttling, and my friend who has the exact same issues with same GPU/CPU but different MB doesn't have any throttling either.
I've confirmed RAM is running in dual-channel, and my Nvidia drivers are up to date. I already set power management and multi-display acceleration to those values globally in the Nvidia control panel.

Mastercoms and I had done some testing yesterday and (probably) isolated the problem to have something to do with being around characters that are firing their weapons. When walking from spawn at the start of the game with my entire team there are no issues whatsoever until people start shooting at each other.
She recommended these commands and they seem to have made this only happen in the more intensive firefights:
mod_load_anims_async 0
mod_forcedata 1
mod_forcetouchdata 1
mod_touchalldata 1

Gotcha, I see where you're going with this now.
With maxperformance + stripped sound I'm getting roughly 20-30 more frames than my friend (who's running default mastercomfig) in some cases with none to few other players around.
However we're still getting relatively the same hard drops when around enough people with me outperforming by maybe 5 fps.

I'm getting no noticeable performance improvements.
The game now feels as if I'm playing at 100+ ping on servers I normally get 30 ping on.

It's definitely when there are other players within the same section of the map as me, though the amount varies.
I think I mentioned that earlier but probably wasn't clear enough.

Seems to have made a minor improvement but I'm still dipping pretty hard in the problem areas. It's more like 95-110 now instead of 80-90 down from 280+ on spawn.

comp preset and -high have made no noticeable performance improvement in regular play with the former making the game look quite a bit worse.

Oh yeah, VRAM definitely isn't the issue then. As long as it's anywhere under 3.5GB the 970 doesn't care. I'm setting up the comp preset right now and we'll see if it solves anything.

Does anybody happen to know how much VRAM TF2 tends to use? I've been thinking about my problem while my power's been out and remembered why the 970 got such a bad rap for its weird memory allocation.
Are there any console/launch commands to limit VRAM use?

Borderless windowed isn't an option in the settings, but I can remove -windowed. I tried -high for a bit and didn't really notice any difference. I'll try running one of the benchmarks with and without it if I get a chance.

I'm using a high performance power plan but haven't tried messing with these performance options: https://i.imgur.com/q0GEghj.png
I'm also disabling desktop composition and display scaling on high DPI settings for hl2.exe.
I should note again that my friend with basically the same build but runs in fullscreen without disabling those 2 things is having the same issue in the same places.

-windowed -noborder -novid -nojoy -nosteamcontroller -noff -nohltv -softparticlesdefaultoff -reuse -primarysound -snoforceformat -swapcores

Before the config I was just using: -windowed -noborder -novid

Still getting the same drops in the same problem areas with 5.0.3. It seems like only a few specific maps have been truly fixed by the default config.
I'll try the comp preset out tomorrow and report back, though I suspect I'm probably just hitting some CPU bottleneck (hl2.exe total usage is ~50% and Core 0 is almost maxed out). My friend with the same GPU, CPU, and monitor has almost the exact same issues.
80-90fps is by no means unplayable but the dips are jarring and make aim smoothness inconsistent.

just tried a couple more maps with this config, still getting random drops to ~80 on koth_sawmill and banana bay for example. I disabled player outlines so I don't know why this is happening.

That's what I've read and it's not a really good risk to take just to not have to play in borderless window. At least with desktop composition disabled I'm not really experiencing any noticeable input delay.