I generally have nice fps, stable 60-70 on ultra settings and about 80-100 on medium settings in most areas. But two areas give me huge troubles:
1. Random encounter grain field area. Fps drops to 30-50% of what is usually is, usually staying at about 30 fps. This seems to be caused by shadows. Even the lowest shadows quality and distance settings give huge slowdowns. If I turn shadows off completely fps gets get back to normal. Are there too many objects (grain?) that cast shadows? According to hardware monitors bottleneck seems to be on GPU side.
2. River/waterfall area at the beginning of the fourth main quest locations. FPS drops to 20-35 depending on the level of textures settings. Fps drop also correlates with how much of screen space is occupied by running water. No other settings seems to have any noticable effect, so it looks like it's a problem with water texture. Is it too detailed even on lowest settings? Video Ram and System Ram are far from being full, GPU load is 100% and according to temperatures GPU seems to start throttling or getting really close to it.
My rig is: Ryzen 2600x, 3300 MHZ 16 GB RAM, SSD, GTX970
Similar info about significant drops in the waterfall area were also obtained from other gamers with average to high specs hardware (2600x + GTX970, 2600x + GTX970, 9700k + RTX2080)
Same problems here, though I posted about it in another thread (on top of the grain field area, the castle area in Caer Cyflyn after getting the crown also slows down significantly). Only setting that seems to make a difference is as you said, the level of texture settings. This problem though was in version 1.0.18 as well so the new patch wasn't really responsible for it (well at least for me it didn't change anything).
My rig is i5-3570k @ 4.3GHz, 16GB RAM, SSD & GTX1060 6GB
For the waterfall area I get ~15FPS on Ultra & ~37FPS on Lowest, but Ultra with lowest texture settings ~33FPS running a resolution of 1920x1200 (slightly above Full HD's 1920x1080).
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