Why does Kingdom Come II freeze when entering crowded towns?

I felt totally ripped out of the medieval immersion whenever I entered a town; the screen would just freeze, creating a jarring first-person experience. I tried closing every single background app to free up resources, but my frame rates still swung wildly between 42-68 FPS per MSI Afterburner. I finally used the GamePP Process Priority Manager to lock the game's main process to Realtime priority and killed redundant network sync services. Now, the frame generation interval has converged to a smooth 12-18ms per RTSS, and my core temps are a steady 64-70℃ per AIDA64.