Choppy video playback Premiere Pro 14.9.0 (52)

Is anyone having issues with PPro cc2020 14.9.2 (build 52) playing a timeline smoothly?

I am in the midst of editing a documentary with footage from multiple sources (Blackmagic RAW, AVC (h.264), HEVC, MPEG2 (M2T)).  The timeline had been playing well. In error, I upgraded from 14.7.0, and now I'm having issues playing the timeline (which is 1080/23.97)

Things I have done to try and remedy:

- Deleted media cache and rebuilt

- Deleted index metadata

- Shut off "High Quality Playback"

- Lowered playback resolution to "half"

- Tried the latest nVidia drivers (studio and Game Ready)

Mind you, this was playing well. With my current hardware (which I will list). Now, when you hit the space bar to begin playback, it takes a bit to begin playing. The clip will begin playing well, then sometimes, randomly the clip or the next clip will start getting choppy playback (dropping frames).

I'm still able to edit. It's just minorly irritating to not know why the playback performance has changed.

Any reasonable thoughts? Thanks!

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6800K CPU @ 3.40GHz 3.40 GHz

32GB RAM

GTX 1080

Windows 10 Pro/64  20H2 19042.804

2 Monitors 1920x1080/60

AC97 audio