Title.
The game stutters when they first are rendered onto my screen / in the buildings that appear on my screen. Happens zoomed in or out. I also get really bad stuttering when driving, but that seems to be a norm at this point - also because it's rendering a bunch of stuff.

I also just get bad FPS drops in general sometimes dropping from 60 to sometimes sub 30's randomly. Most settings are at their lowest, blood decals at 30%, turned off 3D textures,etc etc. Maybe I missed something?

i7-6700k (Quad Core; 4GHz) CPU
MSI GTX 1070 8GB GPU
16GB RAM
Game is running off of a 1TB SSD

Any help on this? Sort of a buzzkill when the game hard stutters randomly and then I get bit because of it.

Using mods?
Tried a reinstall? (Game is tiny)

I have a very similar setup to you, 6700k with a 1080 MSI, the main difference would be that I run my games off a PCIE SSD

This happens with or without mods.
Can try another reinstall as I did have to move drives recently.

If it matters, my boot drive is an NVME, but I have my games installed on a separate SSD. Neither ran it better than the other.

Do you have any antivirus software? If yes, can you add an exception to it for this whole folder in
C:\Users\YourUserName\Zomboid
Some anti-viruses check the Zomboid files constantly, which can cause periodic lag in your game.

I have done that from seeing you post that somewhere else. It does say it's an exception for Project Zomboid, but I'll check it out again.

A weird issue I also just had happen while playing on a server is my CPU usage will spike up to about 60% when it's normally 20%, and my GPU will drop to 0% and get a huge stutter as well. Not sure if that might be a server specific thing? I don't know. I never really had these issues prior.

Just wanted to touch back on this and say that neither of the two issues I have reported have been fixed and I've done as asked. Not sure what else to do here.

Well, do you have any other applications running in the background? I would recommend turning all of them off. Additionally did you try lowering your game settings?

The issue is how the game renders things, not running processes.
Performance has been getting gradually worse for a long while, and the devs really need to address it meaningfully.

Not entirely incorrect, but performance cannot get "gradually worse" on a new game, which is what this post is about as far as I am aware.