Lots of animals nearby cause lag.

[MetalMind]

*** IMPORTANT - if you experience issues stated in this thread, please let us know / confirm it ***

I wrote it in the past, and I will do it again, because the issue is getting worse and worse. I can have 15 hogs, boars, mule deers in render range and the game is stable. The problem exists with new animals (dall sheeps, grey wolves, rocky mountain elks, ptarmigans) - I have several of them in the render range and the game starts to be laggy. I shoot the gun, the animals flee and the game is again 60 FPS. Optimalization problem? Why I don't experience it with animals released long time ago? 20 boars near the feeder, 15 yotes in pack, and the FPS is OK. Doesn't the game deserve some love on the optimalization side? I have no lag issue with other games.

Any of you guys are experiencing it?

[Levado]

No, I never have that problem. What is the frame rate like when it drops below 60fps, do you have vsync on and more importantly, what kind of hardware are you using?

[MetalMind]

The FPS go down to 40 - 35.

With V-sync ON or OFF it is the same.

Hardware:

Operating System
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1
CPU
AMD FX-6300

RAM
12,0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 669MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
ASUSTeK Computer INC. M5A78L-M LX3 (AM3R2)
Graphics

2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 (Gigabyte)

Audio
Realtek High Definition Audio

I don't think it is hardware issue. Older released animals have no that issue, besides other games play stable.

Besides, the problem started to exist after one of the updates (I think it was after halloween update)

[SoftShoe]

If a herd of Dalls come into render range I notice my system will chug for a sec then smooth out. I dont pay attention to my FPS so no clue what it reads.

[kevin2106]

I have that too, BUT, i drop to about 1-15 FPS... I start a game at about 150 FPS (Reserve doesn't matter that much, still around that number), and then it at one point suddenly drops down to about 40-50. After i drop down there, the real drops that sometimes go down to 10 start happening. I don't know if it's the same problem you have, but it might be related to it.

Since 2014 when i started playing the game, i have never been under 100 FPS (I had some drops to like 60 but that was once in a month and lasted about 10 seconds). But then after the Halloween Patch all of this started, and it's still like that months later... Only thing that has been changed on my PC since it started happening, is my GPU. I went from a 970 GTX to a 1060 GTX OC, and it was still happening. Note: The 1060 performs a lot better on other games than the 970, except on theHunter.

[MetalMind]

This is not an GPU issue. When it happens, I can look to the ground (to minimize GPU usage) and it changes nothing, FPS drops. I shoot the rifle, all animals spook and I'm stable even on very demanding GPU maps.

(I was writting it to previous poster but it seems that he deleted his post)

[Thoke2014]

I'm wondering if I may be experiencing the same thing. I just upgraded my system from an AMD RX 250x to a 580x (top of the line card) and I am still experiencing FPS issues. I would expect the 580 to be able to handle whiteheart island (in the golden treestand) on pretty much max settings (I had shadows on medium, aliasing on 2x, and filtering on 4x) but I was getting FPS drops of down to 50 with V-sync on when groups of elk or blacktail would come by it seemed. Ticked down my setting and went to the mountains in TGT and getting drops there down to 55 but when I'd look up at the sky it'd go back to 60.
Edit : (Just walked over a hill in TGT to a big group of ptarmigans and had a huge FPS drop as soon as they appeared.)

[DYEUZ]

Since the introduction of Pika Bay , i've been having lag issues big time . Never before , in over 4 years of playing did i get the lag i'm having now, with the same GPU and machine .
As low as 7-8 FPS at time . The FPS runs like a roller coaster . Very frustrating . I tried different setting combos . Nothing really is working . Sure , if i play at low settings for all , i'll walk a bit better , but what an ugly game it becomes then . I often need to run , to get any kind of decent speed .

In WRR, when i am surrounded by lots of Dall Sheep tracks , its terrible . Seems that its when i encounter , think bushes , lots of tracks , etc .
Wish i could have more knowledge of PC stuff and fix this .

tyvm

[TheSheWolf]

I strongly suspect it's terrible optimization with the animals that have new "fur" textures. I experience it when looking at any animals with lots of fur. It's as if the game's trying to render each hair even at max range.

[Levado]

It's as if the game's trying to render each hair even at max range.

It doesn't render single hairs as far as I can tell, to me they look like polygons with just a hair texture on it, which is most definitely nothing similar to the far more demanding Nvidia HairWorks, but nevertheless I do expect some impact, since far more polygons would have to be used than for the older animals which just had a texture on top of the polygons that create the actual model.