Zone Of contamination massive frame drop - any one else experiencing this?

[thepatsbro]

So i've been playing TLD for years, started on xbox back in 2016, then in 2020 made my switch to pc. i'm on my 2nd pc right now and i'd say it's pretty well equipped to run TLD:
asus tuf gaming 3060ti paired with a intel i7-11700k. 
(btw i'm still playing on the xbox copy that i bought all those years ago, through the windows/microsoft store. it was perfect because it had all my progress saved and i never saw the need to buy it again on steam, so i kept playing on the xbox/windows copy and i still do)
I play on a 1440p monitor, that has 165hz refresh rate. 
I have maxed out quality settings on the game, with the exception of medium shadow quality (i don't really care about it}
When i played TLD on this system it always ran smooth like butter, and i would be getting very high frames. Pretty much almost always maxing out my monitor with how many frames it can show per second. I'd always get around 165fps if not more.

So i hopped on tld today to finally play the new update to the dlc and check out the zone of contamination. I have a save where i left off finishing mapping forsaken airfield, so I loaded up that one and made my way to the new region. everything was running well like usual. 
After i got through the tedious cave system that connects forsaken airfield to the zone of contamination, i finally got to the end of the cave and reached the new region.
As soon as i loaded into the new region, my frames dropped all the way down below 60fps. In the new region i average about 45-55 fps no matter where I am. 
I tried loading into it through with new save but the same thing happens. 
In every other region, I get basically 3x more frames than i do in the zone of contamination. 
I wanted to see if anyone else was having this issue or if it's only me. Or maybe this is some next level God tier region that makes my system feel like it's getting old now😆
I have some screenshots here of fps that i get in other regions. I only included a few because i didn't feel like going to the rest since i've been there plenty of times and i know what fps i get there. But still there are some for reference:

[BugReportEnthusiast]

The only thing i've noticed with FPS drops in this update is animal AI tanking your framerate when they can't reach you (wolf, bear, timberwolf) and glimmer fog tanking your FPS when you're near lights or buildings.

I haven't experienced FPS drops just randomly while strolling through the region

[thepatsbro]

It's not really random but it's just the whole region that's like that for me. the fps stays around 45-55 anywhere i go. 3x less than what it is in any other region.
maybe it's an optimization issue since it's a windows copy or something

[hozz1235]

Are you running any mods?

[thepatsbro]

13 hours ago, hozz1235 said:

Are you running any mods?

Nope. Completely vanilla

[hozz1235]

May want to bring this up in the Technical forum.