Framerate issues in the second area (PC)

Hey guys, is anyone else getting a severe framerate drop in the second hub world? In the first area, I was anywhere between 70-100 FPS with an occasional and very short drop to 45 when a ton of orcs were on the screen. This second area with all it's greenery and trees is killing my rig, and I'm getting 20-40 fps average. Help?

i5 2500k, 8GB RAM, GTX780 running the game at High/Ultra (I did not enable the high res texture pack).

@thornie: try dropping down Ambient Occlusion one notch.

@mb beat me to it. From what I hear the second area is a lot more brighter so my first performance hog suspect would be the ambient occlusion

Cool, thanks guys. I'll try that when I get home today.

Quick update... For whatever reason, when I loaded the game up last night the hitches in the framerate were gone. As I got about an hour into the game, it started up again. So I'm assuming that something is going on with the VRAM usage in the game. I solved the issue by capping the frame rate to 60 and played for about 4 hours with no slowdown. I also lowered the grass draw distance from Ultra to high and left all other settings the same.

I've had weird framerate issues after changing settings or resolution etc. Even in the benchmarks, sometimes i'll get 60-70fps then later on it'll be 30-40 on the same benchmark settings, and then if i restart the computer it's back up again. Happened when i was testing settings, and again when i played on a different monitor (after i switched back to the one i normally use). Not sure what's causing it, maybe vram (running a hd7950, fx8350 4ghz), makes it hard to know what settings i can actually run smoothly at.

Yeah, the second area especially at night when its raining is really heavy to run it seems.

I think it's the general consensus on all versions. My PS4 version certainly stutters a whole lot when commanding a lot of orcs in the second area.

Maybe this was just a series of coincidences, but do other people get more lag when fighting captains and warchiefs? I was fighting 3 captains and a few regular dudes, and by framerate TANKED. But when I have been fighting much larger groups of enemies (such as in the arena side mission/s), the game ran relatively smoothly. Would the fact that 3 captains with ostensibly 3 different AI things running at once be more demanding than a bunch of instances of the plain old grunt AI? I don't actually know how AI stuff works, if that wasn't already obvious.

By the way, I'm running it at 1680x1050 with most things on high (but with stuff like AO and tesselation disabled) on a GTX-570. One thing that helped was setting it to limit the fps to 30.

@bbalpert: I haven't noticed that at all, and I've been in some pretty big fights with up to five captains and a chief. Then again, I am running a monster of a system that doesn't struggle with running Mordor so it may not be the best comparison.

AI scripting does require some CPU to run, so I suppose it's possible that if you were already near 100% utilization, the extra bit of processing required from a few additional captains may push you over the limit and start to slow the game down. If you were interested, you could run a monitoring tool like Core Temp with the graph plugin so you can view your CPU usage over time, and compare how the game normally runs versus when you're around a captain or two.