Game is heavily CPU bound, affecting performance!

[player1]

For test, this was observed in Noctis, the companion gathering area.
I noticed that whatever graphical settings I use, in some section FPS drops below 45.

I use laptop with Core i7-4720HQ CPU. It is decent performing, 4/8HT cores processor for a laptop running at 2.6GHz (up to 3.6GHz turbo boost).

Set with turbo boost disabled, to keep it cooler (in power options set to max at 99%), since otherwise when both CPU and GPU are maxed, it can become very hot.

GPU is GTX 960M. It's a mid grade laptop gaming card.

So, I set up all graphical settings to lowest and resolution at 1366x768, and with those settings it would still have up to 45fps in some areas. Heck, even reducing resolution to something ridiculously low, like 800x600 would not change it.

Then I run MSI Afterburner to capture some metrics, and I noticed that GPU is not maxed out when fps is around 45. To confirm, I enabled tubo boost, and it increased performance in those sections to around 50-52fps.

.

So anyway, I do not know if this is engine issue or optimization error in coding, but this high CPU limitation would lead to frame drops for most of the machines that do not have modern high end desktop CPU, even if having powerful graphics card.

I do not even think, how it would work with more modest laptop CPU (like i5 with 2/4HT cores), or older desktop CPU.