Unable to reproduce on max settings. I get a noticeable FPS drop only when there are like 5 or so smokes all clustered up in one place.

Correct. I will update the description.
Thx

@Bis

50.cal previously suggested reverting to the old smoke system. For the love of God, don't do it!

what was wrong with the old smoke system?

I don't know, I've never played Arma 2 or OA.

I'd rather have basic smoke that I can use than these ones.

They are not occulting the view at all and they eat a lot of resources.

because smoke and other effects must have "Node"...

I begin hate Arma...
I'm tired of think for developers...

I'm not experiencing too much of a performance hit but the smokescreen itself should definitively be bigger. Even with Wind turned completely off the resulting cloud is way to small in width and height making it necessary to throw three or more smokes to get some decent concealment, particularly in rather open enviroments.

Smoke particles still cause massive performance issues in the latest dev version. Even a single smoke grenade can cut my framreate in half if I'm close enough that the smoke fills a significant portion of the screen. Went from 80 fps to around 40 in a test on Stratis using a single grenade. (GTX 770)

I wonder if BI have considered implementing something like this: http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch23.html

It's too bad, strong particle effects is the one visual thing that is really lacking (tiny fires on vehicles, wimpy missile trails, etc).

Try Blastcore A3. Same amount of particles I think, they're just huge.

I have tried blastcore, but one grenade caused a bigger hit than 3 vanilla ones
It could be that those kinds of particles would cause a hit whether mod or vanilla, but I stopped using mods a while ago