Dawntrail Graphics Update — Huge FPS drops in open wide areas with not much going on

Title! Were there any technical reason as to why SE removed the Occlusion Culling option with the graphics update?

As stated on the "Graphics Update" section of the Patch 7.0 Notes post:

The following categories were removed:
Graphics Settings
General

[...]

Disable rendering of objects when not visible. (Occlusion Culling)

http://imgur.com/e2IXGla

( https://imgur.com/e2IXGla )

Regardless of running the game on a modern graphics card or not, it's almost unacceptable to see a 50FPS+ loss in areas like Urqopacha simply because the game is rendering the whole area even though sometimes, depending on where you are, you're barely seeing half of it. An issue that Occlusion Culling (option that "disables" rendering of objects not showing on the screen) greatly alleviated.

It would be really great if Square could find a way to enable this option again. It's not about needing a hardware upgrade—not having this option available it's straight up redundant and not well optimized.

No kidding. From Worlar's Echo Aetheryte, looking North and slightly West completely tanks my framerate. Just panning the camera in that direction makes my system chug, despite there being a huge building blocking my view of the entire map. It's clearly rendering something out of sight that is kicking me down 20-30 fps, and my GPU usage shoots to 100% in task manager. As soon as I look away, back down to 60% GPU and a smooth 60 fps.

I have a decent rig and my fans go supersonic if I login in Tuliyollal. I have never even heard my fans before DT released

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Azi_Chan

No kidding. From Worlar's Echo Aetheryte, looking North and slightly West completely tanks my framerate. Just panning the camera in that direction makes my system chug, despite there being a huge building blocking my view of the entire map. It's clearly rendering something out of sight that is kicking me down 20-30 fps, and my GPU usage shoots to 100% in task manager. As soon as I look away, back down to 60% GPU and a smooth 60 fps.

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Been having the same issue where most of the zones have a "cursed" spot where facing in a certain direction at a certain place tanks the heck out of my FPS.

Overall the shadows look worse then they did before as well, even if I have them set to the absolute highest, though that could be a GPU issue.