I have been playing this game the last 5 days or so and come to the conclusion my hardware is just trash when trying to play this game.
I have been trying to order new parts but there is such a supply issue on some of the parts I have no idea when I can get them so I am stuck with what I have for the moment.

Anyways, there is some kind of weird performance hit/lag I noticed last night when I was in a certain zone that had really high castle like walls. Every time the walls would fade out or fade in, there was noticeable lag. Once that fade happened and I moved past the area, the map would run very smooth till that fade out would happen again in another spot. Its the spots on maps where the high walls would essentially collapse down so you could see your character still..
I think this is the biggest performance issue in this game considering my older hardware, is this fade out/in collapse transition was looked into and possibly changed to not happen. So for example just keep the wall in the collapsed mode and forget trying to show us the transition because its not needed. We know there should be a wall there but don't really need to see it.. I hope I am explaining this properly. I personally think this cry engine is trash. It sucked back in 2005 and sucks today. ITs way too taxing on hardware. I had to start monitoring my temps and cranking the fans up to full to keep the temps aronud 50 on the gpu and I am running water on the cpu so its 47 ish under load in this game.
I can play other games and never have these kinds of issues, except on some new games that need beefy systems.

I understand most people are probably on a lot newer hardware than myself.
I am running essentially an i7 from 2012 and an rx 480 from 2015.. 16 gigs ram and 2 very good ssd drives.
I notice this game is fickle about monitor hz and it seems for my hardware it likes to be set to 60 hz v sync on. If I try to use amd free sync or other 100hz 144hz with v sync the game just hitches badly especially in the main town.

I would absolutely love to see a disable all shadows options and less taxing shaders. I would be perfectly fine playing this game if it looked like torch light or those wow style textures because the game is fun just not fun when it runs so badly..