Ive never had any issues running Fallout before, but all of a sudden my GTX 970 core is constantly at 99% usage when im in game, which causes lots of framerate issues. The past few days it has been really bad, which is since the patch came out. Hopefully im not alone with this issue. My CPU loads are where the normally were, but my GPU is way higher than normal.

That isn't terrible per say. What are your frame rates doing? Are you using mods?

Framerate constantly drops and stays at around 50 most of the time. No major mods using either. Only thing that changed was the patch. Had zero issues prior.

What settings you running at? I'm using an Asus GTX 970 Strix and having a smooth time.

This was happening to somebody, apparently deleting their config files and validating game cache in steam fixed it.

Check your Power Management Mode in your Nvidia Control Panel. You could have changed it accidentally to "Prefer Maximum Performance".

Is you GPU load low at idle? (without running anything heavy)

Also you can try clean boot, to check if a background program is the culprit of that.

Hrm... That'd be odd considering I set that option manually.

What's the option you have set it?

Normally it should be at adaptive mode.

Maximum performance allows the GPU to run at it's maximum performance (so full throttle), regardless of the GPU usage.