Why does Cyberpunk 2077 drop to 25 FPS in crowds with Overdrive?

I felt my immersion shatter when entering high-density areas in Night City; frames plummeted from 60 to 25, making combat feel sluggish. I tried increasing virtual memory to 32GB, but it only extended loading times by 10 seconds without reducing the stuttering. I then used the GamePP Resource Scheduler to set the game process priority from Normal to Realtime and restricted background memory. RTSS monitoring confirmed frame times converged to 12-16ms, while HWMonitor showed memory temperatures stable at 42-48℃ and AIDA64 reported physical memory usage at 14.2-15.8GB.