Performance and FPS - mostly tied to lighting/shadowing.

...at least in my experience.

I have a i7-6700k and a Geforce 1080. Did some testing.

With the /debug FPS counter standing in heavily lighted and shadowed areas such as Serenity Isle east of Britanny...I managed 30-ish FPS average on max settings(sometimes it dips further and sometimes not). 1080p resolution and with shadows at maximum. This is also with the "fantastic" or whatever max setting it is in the game.

Whenever I turn the shadows to off...my FPS doubles to the 55-60 FPS mark and stays there on average unless I experience hitching and stuttering because of pop in and whatnot.

Even putting the shadows on LOW cuts my FPS in half. Putting shadows to max doesn't really lower it further when testing on any scene that I have noticed.

The shadows and lighting need to be optimized and additional modifications need to be added...such as shadow resolution, max lights and shadows and even make a toggle based on radius around the players.

If you do these things then performance should increase dramatically, IMO.

Anyone else do any testing to confirm these findings?

 

It depends. If you move around, then there's plenty of things other than graphics that can influence framerate... including things that, believe it or not, are designed to reduce framerate. Weird, I know.

In this post, I talk about how Occlusion Culling (among other things) influences performance and it is a constant balance between CPU and GPU loads. Even something as simple as "using less memory" can lead to "doing more computations" since you're storing less data and might have to redo some calculations.

Whenever it's for video games or movies, lighting and shadows is the most expensive, computer intensive thing you can do. And the reason why modern games look as good as they do is because they cut corners... corners that a game like SotA can't really afford without sacrificing what makes SotA special.

That's probably the best thing they can do to improve performance.

That already happens.