ah you may be right. it was my internal hard drive, and i didn't mess with any of the graphical options either. I'll probably give it another run through to see if that fixes anything, and if not I'll look in a little more. just not used to my pc struggling with anything lol, but thank you for the tips!
Yeah it uses a lot of advanced UE5 features and Lumen ray tracing is turned on by default so switching that off at least can help a lot! Also image scaling is off so you get your monitor's full resolution. Turning on TSR, DLSS or FSR and adjusting the resolution percentage will have a huge impact.
I've been trying to stay on top of optimisation for the game, but I'll be spending more dedicated time on it before the full game comes out.