Framerates suffering while driving on mountains

[Guest]

Hello, I've been experimenting with rover designs lately, and I've been pushing my designs to be able to drive up and over the mountain passes west of KSC. I've noticed that my framerates are tanking when I get into the mountains. Everything runs just fine around KSC and on regular to somewhat hilly grass covered ground. But, when I start getting into the rocky textures of the mountains, the MET/UT clock turns yellow, slowing things down and making EVA like walking through molasses. Hoping this is a known issue with a quick fix, google searches are coming up empty with a lot of old information from pre-1.0. Any ideas on what is causing this? Will supply more info if needed. Modded install with KER, KAC, and mechjeb. Module manager and some personal tweaks also, including script for setting default pod monopropellant to zero.

[Guest]

I've done some tinkering. Main menu - settings - graphics - render quality set to fastest and turned down texture quality to 1/4 res and the MET clock goes back into green while on the rocky textures. It seems that the render quality setting has the biggest effect. I can turn the texture setting back up to full res and I only get a flickering yellow, stays mostly green. Also, the zoom level matters. If I scroll out, the clock stays green all the time. If I zoom in again close to the rover, clock goes yellow. So, my hardware is not the greatest, I'm running on a laptop with a dedicated nvidia card, but still not gonna match the performance of a desktop. But, I don't understand why the game runs fine while on the grassy textures as opposed to the rocky textures, only seeing the performance hit while in the mountains on the rocky texture. Also, when I view the performance tab in the task manager, there is virtually no change in cpu or memory usage whether clock is yellow on the mountains or in the green on the runway, confusing. I remember back when you could change stuff in the settings.cfg for the ocean lag problem. This seems very much like the ocean lag problem, but there is no obvious settings for changing rocky texture minDistance or subdivision. Any ideas as to what's going on or how to fix would be appreciated. Thanks.

[Guest]

I found the cause of my lag problem. It wasn't the difference in terrain texture, but rather the lights on the small landing gear. I shut the lights off and the lag disappeared.  Don't know why I didn't think of that earlier.