Crashes, freezes and more crashes and freezes constantly

Running on PC, windows 10, 16gb ram, SSD, AMD Ryzen 5 3600 cpu, Nvidia RTX 2060 6GB, I open steam, go to library, run POE2. About 60% of the time, the game freezes on the GGG gears opening animation. CTRL + Alt + Delete to shutdown process and start again.

Eventually, get past the GGG opening animation and can see the two cogs moving as its loading in the login screen. 50% chance to freeze before the login screen. CTRL + Alt + delt to end process and start all over again.

Eventually get to loading screen on like the 5th attempt, always logs into the game at this point (london server).

Running windowed full screen, vulkan renderer, dynamic resolution off, no vsync, image quality balanced, no sharpness, no HDR, Nvidia reflex on, engine multithreading on

Once I manage to get in game is playable 75% of the time, and the rest of the time it will freeze doing basic stuff like when clicking on stash in hideout, or simply alt + tabbing out to open a browser window and going back into the game.

Every other modern game I have on this same computer has zero problems like this.

All drivers up to date.

Any ideas or is this just a pi$$ poor optimised (or lack of) game right now?