Game drops to unplayable FPS

[Exist]

Hey I just installed the game and as soon as it boots up, in the menus and in the gameplay there are major drops in FPS, like the game will be on the same frame for like 15 seconds and then it will run fine for 5 seconds and then another standstill. Hoping someone has a solution. I already turned V sync off in game as well as changing to Performance in Nvidia control panel. Specs are below:

windows 11
16 GB ddr4
Gtx 1660 Ti
1TB Hdd / 256 GB Ssd
144 hz

I will try installing on my other laptop and see what happens. But I feel bad that it cant run on the first one. So help would be great, thank you.

edit: Same issue on my other laptop. other laptop specs below:

windows 11
16 GB ddr4
Rtx 2080
1 TB hdd / 256 GB Ssd
144 hz

[Lil C]-[ew C]-[ew is ☂д☂]

@Tydo:
Since Cooter pointed out this workaround does not affect the perfomance and only does it do is stablish a proper link to internet entry then I'm no longer interested in proceeding so I have reverted back to the original file just in case.

[Tydo]

okies, just wanted to share. Like I said, I use the file for other games too (just blackholing different things).
I have a bunch of really old games, that want to talk to servers on the net that (at best) are no longer there.
Just thinking of how insecure those games may be is chilling. One of them even has a known vulnerability that is not going to get patched, making it very risky indeed to trade savesgames, replays and addons for it.

Not much to comment on performance,. Running with a gtx1050 @ 120hz no problems.
In your case I would be betting on driver crashing, which can have symptoms like that - appears to freeze, while nv display container reboots it in the background.

One of the big issues there might be incompatible ambient occlusion - things have changed a lot since the game came out.
I would definitely turn it all the way off, as well as any 'temporal AA' bs that is often wonky as hell on top of being ugly as sin. Then gradually adjust the SSAO up.
I'm running it on medium no issues except it is, well, ugly, so may as well turn it off.