Great news Guardians! Yesterday we discovered the culprit that was causing some of you to lose FPS while in Third Person mode.
We were already nearing the release of Version 1.3 so we have been working endlessly to ensure that it doesn't delay 1.3 and we are still on track. The issue affected every single map so they all needed to be re-worked.
We wanted to cover it a bit more in detail below for those interested. The issue was the foliage. It wasn't necessarily the amount of foliage, it was just how it was placed. The overdraw was from empty space in alpha-masked textures. This would occur in Third-Person because the empty space was stacking on top of one another and due to their size this was happening many times over before it was faded or occluded. You wouldn't typically have any stack occurring in Top-Down which is why those frames were typically unaffected.
What are Alpha Mask Textures? These are parts of a texture/material that tell an area to be invisible when in use. This is used on things like grass because games use square-shaped textures and grass is very much not a square so you color in blades of the grass and alpha-map the non-blade parts to be invisible.
This will be fixed for Version 1.3 and we will be very curious to see how those who were affected can handle Third Person now.