the performance of the game went from really bad late game to overall, constantly strange.
from the start of a new save, about every 5 minutes i get a huge performance dip for about 30 seconds. on my old save, it's pretty much exactly the same. changing graphical settings can lessen how frequently the performance dips happen, but it doesn't eliminate them.
arguably performance is worse than before, because now when i have the graphical settings set higher than potato, the game is a stuttering mess from beginning to end, when before it only got bad around day 40+
wish i could offer more info that might be helpful. i'm on windows 10, i have 16gb of RAM, and this is my processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-9300H CPU @ 2.40GHz 2.40 GHz. i don't know if any of that matters or is useful, but, y'know. godspeed.
edit: oh yeah, also completely vanilla. i never use mods.