Drop 110 FPS in Shadow Calc by rotating camera, why?

Hey Everyone!

UE 4.14 of course here. I have a Third Person character running around in my environment! I’m developing for VR so every frame counts. I’m also not the final artistic pass, so it’s important that when I hand over the project that I have a good frame-rate abundance for my colleague to use. I’m shooting for 300fps on the handover, but this issue is kicking me well under my target.

When my character is standing in an area and the camera is facing a particular location, I see a HUGE framedrop, BUT when I rotate the camera to the other side, I get my frames back.

The strange part is that both according to ProfileGPU are caused by my ThirdPersonCharacter shadow.
I can move the character around this area, as long as I’m looking this direction I get the same frame drop.

The dropped frames show up in “ShadowProjectionOnOpaque”, with a 1.78ms on frame
While the normal one shows up in “ShadowDepths”, with a .02ms on frame

Screenshots:

118658-shadowdropprofile.png

118659-shadownodropprofile.png

Why does the camera location (not character) determine this?
Where are the opaques in question? The shadow is rendering onto the landscape in both cases.

Also I see that some of my shadows seem a little too dark. Bonus points for pointing out where I’m going wrong on the lighting!

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks.