Yesterday, I finally realized what is the cause of most of the major frame rate drops. It's the health bar animation on the bottom of the screen. Whenever you gain/lose health it has this nice transition animation. Only thing is: It impacts performance to a degree that it can even freeze the game for the duration of the animation. This is mostly an issue if you get hit of course, cause the frame rate drop often results in another hit.

How do I know it's this animation?
1. Whenever you get hit/lose health, frame rate drops. The game becomes very laggy/unresponsive because of this, but only for the duration of the animation.
2. Taking a pill results in the same performance drop. This is only really noticeable with T3 pills because of their amount of health they provide.
3. Similarly, stepping on hearts dose the same.
4. Getting revived by another player or CE.
3. Standing on a healing pad practically kills frame rate. And this one made me realize all this. And this one also nicely shows that the performance drop isn't related to something else because there is no battle going on at all.

By now I can hear all those "The hell, get yourself a new bleeding-edge PC." answers. But firstly, this game runs fine. Especially since the "blast processing" patch. Frame rates are perfectly fine until this animation kicks in because you got hit. And secondly, I am able to reproduce this - although to a lesser degree - on a laptop that is perfectly capable of playing this game on medium graphics details. And on that laptop a hit often results in laggy movement for the duration of this animation.

This issue made me waste 10CE on a rev in a d28 arena yesterday. Frame rate was perfectly fine while I was fighting and didn't get hit. It was also fine while I was dead. But wen I revived the animation kicked in and locked me into place even though I would have been perfectly able to fight my way out of the ambush otherwise. I had 2 Penta-Hearts and a +18 Vitapod. It's mostly in issue in T3 because of the huge amount of health you can accumulate and the huge amount of damage monsters can deal there. The frame rate was fine when I was walking up to the healing pads. But once I was on them, frame rate completely plummeted. Until health was fully restored. Standing with full health on a healing pad does not incur a performance hit.

So here is what I am proposing to/asking of OOO:
1. Either make this animation completely optional with a check box in advanced settings
2. Disable this animation for low graphics details
3. Directly fix its performance issue
4. Any combination of the above
Personally, I am for 2 because I believe this would require the least amount time from your devs and would help many players that are close to the minimum requirements of the game (and even those who aren't).

I ask anyone who can relate to this problem to +1 this so that OOO can know that it's not just me who has this issue.

And as a last note I kindly ask a dev/admin to send me a note if this has been acknowledged/is being worked on. I ask this because - honestly - the bug reports forum feels largely ignored by devs/admins.