Panning over water causes framerate to drop

[badluckburt 78]

I recently bought TOH as I like flying helicopters in Arma II and wanted something more challenging. I've been running the benchmark challenge to see how to configure it and I've got it running steady at 30 frames per second and higher. However, as the camera pans during the benchmark from the suburbs to Elliot Bay, the framerate drops to 22 frames somehow as the camera pans over the water, the part where you see the sunlight reflecting. When it reaches land it goes back up to 30 again but there's something in the water, so to put it. I've tried various settings but it's consistent so there seems to be an underlying cause.

I'm running this game on an Intel Core2 Duo 3.06 ghz with Windows 7 64-bit, 4GB of RAM and my video-card is an AMD Radeon 6570 with 2GB of RAM. I also own Arma II and the Arma III Alpha, both of which run fine as well. My videocard's drivers are up to date as well.

- edit

I've done some more testing and it only seems to happen in the benchmark so I'll just live with it. When flying over the water myself, there is a framerate drop but it's a lot less significant. I suppose it has to do with the amount of calculations needed to render the water and the sunlight hitting it, it's a shame there's no way to turn down the water quality as that would help confirm my suspicions but it's definitely not game-breaking for me.

My settings get me 30 to 60 frames per second when there's not a lot of water being rendered and it looks great for what my rig can do so I'm good :)

Edited March 31, 2013 by BadLuckBurt
added info after more testing

[badluckburt 78]

I decided to resurrect my thread after something I tried today:

I lowered all settings, disabled shadows, minimized draw distance, I did keep the object around 1800 meters though to keep it fair. Then I ran the benchmark getting 60 FPS up to the panning I mentioned in the original post. The moment the FPS hit below 30, I went into the video options and switched video memory from High to Very High and then back to High again. As I continued the benchmark, the FPS shot up to 100 and over and went back to around 60 when it reached the island, having to draw objects again.

Does this mean my video-memory is still full of object data when it should be rendering a full screen of water? And does anyone have any tips on how to fix it?