Originally posted by Tromador:

So sure, there's eleventy bazillion instances, and all the lights forever with their particle effects and yes, I have the graphics turned up to maximum so one could argue I'm looking for trouble.

But here's my confusion, in a pretty meadows with nothing in the area, my GPU (according to a particular performance meter, so sure take it with a pinch of salt, but anyway) is happily chugging away at about 34% load and F2 says all the FPS I can eat. In the complex area though, the GPU drops to about 14% load and I get graphics lag. If it's more difficult to render, why doesn't the GPU ramp up to deal with the extra requirement, instead of slowing down?

I've read various pages suggesting doing things in the nVidia control panel, startup options and editing the boot.ini file, without much success, but I wonder if anyone has a clue why the GPU slows down, instead of taking on the extra work.

I'm running an I9 13900K, nVidia 3070ti, 32GB RAM @ 2650x1440 resolution.

You're experiencing a CPU bottleneck technically. However the cause is actually in the engine. In lay terms, they call it a drawcall bottleneck, and it's essentially an in-software limitation where a single particular pipeline is saturated in the CPU queue. This won't show up as a buried needle in any kind of normal performance measuring tools you'll find floating out there.

The only way to alleviate this bottleneck is to either lower settings so there's fewer draws being called (Shadows and by extension lights are the biggest culprits) or increase the raw throughput of your entire CPU by upping the clock speed (Brute Force)

There's nothing wrong with your game or your hardware.

The GPU is slowing down, because the GPU isn't working anymore, it's waiting for the CPU to push out what it needs to draw.

I would need to know a little bit more about what your actual FPS numbers are though. Like "All the FPS I can eat" can be any number between 0-99,999,999. I don't know how much you can eat. Likewise, I don't know what you consider "Lag".

on an RTX 3090, I can swing from 144fps (Where I cap for my monitor) all the way down to the high 60's in the most complex bases with enemies running around. Even can drop into the low 40's in the mountains, during a blizzard with High Particle Lights enabled. Speaking of that, you should set Particle Lights to low, it makes virtually no visual difference, and a massive performance increase in some scenes. You also should not have Maximum Shadows, but set it to one step lower. It's another setting where you will never see the visual difference, but it dramatically improves your framerate.