Unbareable FPS drop - no idea what caused it, had to rebuild

I was building my level and noticed the FPS dropping more and more. I have vsync on at 30fps (for recording purposes) and it was dipping below that! The level never went below 60 before. Then 20, then 12fps!!

I figured, something messed, reloaded the level, same thing.

Tried a different car, same thing!

Removed ALL cars.. changed view distance, shadow distance, shadow detail, removed the entire forest, removed all vegetation, and the ONLY thing that worked: Changed view distance from 15000 to 150. At 150 I was solid 30fps no matter what, so there was something to do with draw distance. Then inching the draw distance up, I noticed it only happened when I viewed ONE angle!

Max gfx, max everything it ran fine until I viewed that one direction (happened to be the one I was working in ) so I reverted to a save from two days ago, and it worked totally fine.

Sooooooooo, I redid all that I've done and now I'm back to where I was 4 hours ago (already made the models, animations, and textures) and it's running totally fine!

VERY bizarre, and no idea what it would have been. I have more lights and assets now than I did when it went haywire. All I can say is that I'm super happy I make backups! (even if they're TWO freakin' days old)

 

Yeah I've been using dds only and all my mesh roads are deleted. It's so strange! CTRL+F shows 0.1 99% of the time so there's something going crazy trying to do something! I've noticed I have 60 sounds playing, all of which are looping, are sounds a performance killer?
** nope I just deleted all of them, and zero fps difference.

MAN
--- Post updated ---
Dynamic.. reflections.

I turned them on with max settings last night and forgot. It was running fine on the car and area I was at, but from 4km away at max settings it kills the fps! Turning it off immediately made the GPU work hard again back to as high as 1.8!

SO STUPID =D

The part that bothered me was how much slower it ran while in F11 editor mode vs playing the game, I figured it was something related to that.

 

It just happened again! While facing the same direction!!

It WASN'T reflection related. I turned them back on and performance was fine again, until . . now! I changed a texture and suddenly BLAMO 7fps. This time I exited back to game WITHOUT saving, and it immediately fixed itself. Went back to the editor, and no problem. So whatever I did last time, when I saved it before exiting the editor. . it saved whatever the hell the gremlin was!

I'll try to pay more attention to it happening the next time, but my GPU time went to 40! From 0.1 that it is now, to 40, so something serious happens =D

 

Not sure what you mean? I do backups all the time, but it just happened AGAIN! This time I hit "save" because I'm so used to just hitting, "F11, Enter, ya ya I just wanna test" and now it' saved whatever the hell bug this is. It's nothing to do with what's in view, draw calls are 5000 regardless of which way I look. Sounds, terrain, sky, lights, shadows, nothing seems to make any difference! The last time it happened was when I re-imported my tunnel and hit F11 to test it, suddenly BOOM frames were killed, and stayed killed. I delete the tunnel, same thing. There's no collision on it yet, so it doesn't matter if physics are active or not there's zero difference! This happened yesterday when my sounds had looped for over 5800 seconds, and this time it happened again after 5800 seconds, that's pretty coincidental?