Framerate drop in Serbule when looking in certain directions (with video)

Time Recorded: 3/19/2018 Time: 9:30 EST

For the first time in over a year, I've noticed a frame rate drop when traveling through the keep in Serbule. I'm not sure what's so different tonight, but I decided to try to troubleshoot it some.

That's when I noticed that my framerate drop (from 50-60 fps to 20-30 fps) happens only when I'm walking in certain directions. I've recorded a video of it (includes my in-game video settings). Please note I do have the optimize meshes special option enabled.

Hardware: GeForce GTX 970 using driver version 391.01

https://youtu.be/Dhd6SzGF7p4

This sounds alot like the drop that sends some of us into a spin when we turn that corner.

The weird thing is, it happens on my Mac Air and my big VR PC, but mostly when I have network latency. (Other people don't see this combination.)

Hmm.

I tested it and my results are different.
If I'm in the middle of town my FPS is better when looking east or west.
At the east end it looks better looking east; south end, south, etc.
Unless there are more than a dozen people standing together it doesn't matter about people or name labels.
So for me, it's the buildings that cause the overall framerate drop in Serbule.

This also goes along with the issues people have using the mouse to turn instead of the keyboard around buildings.

I say let the Myconians sac Serbule and burn all the buildings to the ground!

Maybe this is an error from the game

It's no doubt an issue with the game or a setting, we've seen that sort of problem before. It can be caused by a lot of things, but the biggest culprit seems to be the day/night cycle which triggers some Unity bugs related to shadows -- even if you have shadows turned off. You can tell when that's the cause because the problem will go away after an hour or so of game-time.

We've had no luck alleviating the underlying Unity bug, so we've instead switched to an entirely new sky-dome system for the next update -- one that hopefully won't be as susceptible. Unrelated to that, it looks like Unity may have finally fixed the bug in a recent patch fix. (But about a month too late for us -- we already switched sky systems.) So I'll be interested to see if you still have this problem after the next update!