Back when animated water came out I didn't know why folks were saying it ate up so much FPS. I tried it and it didn't totally kill my frames, it just didn't look as good (to my eyes) as the non-animated water.
However recently I got a new video card and it can handle a lot more. I bumped my detail and range sliders all the way up. On a whim, while flight-testing some Ju88s over the British channel, I turned it on, and my FPS took a nose dive.
I have 60 steady FPS (probably doing 150-200 most times, but VSync is on), but it dropped to the mid-30's with animated water on. So I thought about it and looked around in F3 view and I think I know why.
It's rendering all the water as animated. Even though the only "speckles" you see are immediately below you, it's rendering all water it sees as "animated".
I didn't have this problem before because my detail/range sliders were set fairly close (poor video card) -- so it wasn't rendering as much. Once I set the detail sliders to max it applies that to the water. Only, the water doesn't stop when the trees do, it goes on forever (it seems).
HTC, can I request that the animated water have a range cut-off, so that it will only display xxx amount of water as animated, and not animate the stuff outside of normal range? Is this possible? When you look at the water only one localized area has the reflections. How about just limiting the rendering/texturing/whatever to that region, and stopping it outsize a set buffer past that?
EDIT: By that I mean, compute what would be visible first, then render only that computation.
