Shadows' impact on performance

[ribasmudj.4816]

I've been on an impossible mission to minimize drops below 60 fps in cities and I thought that character limit/quality were the only wild settings but they're not. Shadows have a huge impact actually that has nothing to do with GPU usage, unlike every other game in existence. From none to ultra they drop around 10-15 fps and all that seems to be related to CPU, except it has no CPU impact that I can measure either.

 

I tried to test if overclocking provides any benefits and went up to 5ghz on i7-7700k - almost no improvement. I've no idea how this game works, and after installing d912pxy, all CPU cores show more or less similar usage, without any of them being maxed out. The game remains an fps black hole.