SSD. Don't play the game without it.
For my first 150 or so hours, for reasons I am unable to come up with, I put up with constant stutters, stupid-long load times and crashes. PVP was essentially impossible as my game would stutter whenever someone fired near me.
I went so far as to upgrade from 8 to 16 GB of RAM, which did help, but the game was still plagued with stutters and Reserve was really difficult to play. It's important to note that I was not particularly computer-literate at the time so I could not diagnose the problem perhaps as well as most.
Then I switched my install to SSD, and every single problem I mentioned here stopped almost entirely.
If you want to try Escape From Tarkov, and you don't have an SSD… don't. Just don't.
Side note, switch shadow settings up to high. Notable fps increase.
