So, I've gotten everything pretty fine tuned and am able to run with most graphics options turned on and stay at a 60FPS just fine. I'm having problems in two areas still.
Area 1: Detailed Water -- This works fine if I am only over water deep water, for whatever reason along the shoreline, the game seems to be loading a texture for the ground underneath the texture for the water. This causes a drop to 40FPS from 60 the second it comes into view. I've test both over just land, and over just water and don't have these slow down issues. They only seem to present themselves over the shoreline area where there is an actual discrepancy between where the detailed water is, and what actually shows as land when the detail is turned off (but is actually water if you've ever driven a GV into it). Again, it would appear it's having to load 2 textures for those areas of map, even though it is only displaying the top layer. This would make sense if we had tides, but since we don't, it seems like it's adding additional bloat that's not needed.
Area 2: Clipboard Map -- Along the same lines, I can have a perfect 60FPS when going into a large furball and still perform fine. If I'm nowhere near anyone else and open up my clipboard map, there is an immediate drop to 45-50FPS. I believe this is also a texture related issue where the card is still filling in the area behind the clipboard, even though the clipboard is blocking the view of the graphics.
In both these instances I feel that I probably have some setting tweaked on my card that is causing the drop in performance, but I can't think of what to experiment with or change. I've tested this both with Highres & 512 Shadow and still get the drop in frame rate when displaying the map or flying over the shoreline.
Yes, I realize I can turn off the graphics and look at it lowres all around, but I have a decent computer with a decent amount of memory... anyone with any constructive advice, I'd be most appreciative.
