For the record, I use Windows 7 x64 which by default parks the logical cores of i7 CPUs. I used a tool to disable Core Parking and it seems to have mostly alleviated the FPS drops when selecting characters, still get a little bit of a drop, but not nearly as much as before.

 

Bearing in mind that basically no one else with Windows 7 and an i7 CPU will download a tool to disable Core Parking just to fix their FPS drops though.

Since the only thing that appears to have changed is the inclusion of voice over, maybe that's what's causing the hitching, because VO is played when a character is selected

 

Bester modded out Voice Overs for me to test if the audio was causing the hitching, and here is a video showcasing that there is no hitching with VO disabled ... indicating that it is probably the VO being loaded that's causing the hitching.

Oh no! D:

 

Hope it's sorted out soon. When not recording, do the Fraps numbers still drop like that? Just mindful that Fraps is a massive system drain when recording (yay Shadowplay).

I don't use FRAPS, I use Bandicam and hardware accelerated H264 on the fly encoding. The FPS drop when recording is like 1 FPS (scales with the amount of FPS you are getting, when it's like 600, you might get 550 FPS when recording).

This was fixed just after the build went out, unfortunately.  It's actually reloading the character into the inventory and character sheet every time you change selections.

 

Nice catch though