Apparently certain people who had the game preloaded and didn't download the 400 mb patch in the correct order got hit with some serious forkbomb level fps degrading bs designed to target piraters and make them subliminally think that pirating leads to a sub par gaming experience.
Many people who have the game with the same hardware as me experience minimal fps problems yet min setup is absurdly punished. I read from other users that this inexplicable gap in performance was affecting them too, but it was resolved when they simply reinstalled the game or verified cache.
It seems bethesda wanted to punish zero day crackers with some kind of intentional glitch, but then found half of their legit customer preloaders were accidently affected as well...