Ranged weapons and.. FPS drops..?

[losian2]

So this is kind've weird and I maybe only found this by weird coincidence. I only just realized DDO had a built-in FPS limiter and, since my system is decently beefy, cranked it up to 120. Seems to be running well until I start having some REALLY bad hitching.

Long story short, I found that ANY TIME I fire a ranged weapon, FPS drops proportionally to the frame rate. If I limit it to 35 it only drops 3-5, but if I am at 90-120 it drops 10-15.. but only with repeaters. A great crossbow only drops 4-5.. but it still drops. With a repeater it's incredibly noticable at higher FPS and makes the game utterly choppy and borderline unplayable, it's a hideous mess. Am I the only one seeing this kind of behavior? I searched around a bit and didn't find much else about it but it's driving me crazy now that I know it's there. Limiting my FPS lower makes it less noticable, as the difference between 70 and 65fps and 120 and 105 is much less dramatic, but it seems like a pretty glaring issue, considering. Anyone with a system that can reach higher FPS able to chime in and test?

Extra weird - restarting the client and it seems to have stabilized, I guess I'll jsut have to watch for it and restart the client occasionally if it starts happening. Though I haven't done anything/grouped up/entered quests/etc. yet, if I find somethin' that triggers it I'll add to this post. There's still a frame drop but it's literally like 2-3 at 120fps, so not very noticable at all.. but definitely there. Pretty easy to test standing totally still, any period of time the frames are real stable and drop immediately upon firing a repeater. I'd almost attribute it to more going on on-screen, but that doesn't make sense.. a character animating shouldn't make a huge difference in performance. Characters running onto screen and walking past don't cause any issue - which makes me wonder.. is there something weird in the engine with ranged weapons? Creating the projectile entities or something like that which is prone to performance hitches, however small?