Whenever I turn my character the game freezes for about 1/3 of a second.

This began in the most recent patch.

It makes it look as if I have severe frame lag.

Previously I could run the game on maximum settings with no lag. This makes the game unplayable at the lowest settings. This is the first time I've actually bought a game, because I wanted to support Bethesda. I regret that decision.

Specs:

Radeon 5770 HD
Phenom II Black 3.3ghz x6
8GB DDR3 RAM

Reinstalling/Fiddling with settings did not fix anything.

have you uninstalled your drives for your graphic card. if you have windows 7 after uninstalling the drivers and restarting it should find your drives. then installed them for you. this has happen to me before and after doing that step my lag went away. its very strange i know however its the best fix i can think of. i tried everything out there trust me and the only thing that fix my stuttering or turning lag was uninstalling it and letting windows 7 do it for me . first you need to go into your control setting, then to device management look under display adapter uninstall and restart your computer. the rest is easy we will see a icon on the bottom right that should tell you that its installing it. wait after its installed restart one more time. test out the game, also there is a report that if your file is more the 8 mb it may have become bloated meaning its no longer a good idea to continue. you may have to look at a save that is a few days old just to continue playing. hope that helps