One of the more recent updates (possibly 1.13 as a whole, I haven't been on much during and after 1.13's release), seems to have changed sphere rendering in some way, as it is now considerably more costly to render them. For example, my avatar wears armour comprised of maybe 100 cut and dimpled spheres, this has never been a problem (or I would never have worn it), however now it causes graphics performance to drop to around 7 fps, which makes it extremely unplayable. Taking off the armour causes frame-rates to return to 30+ fps. I understand that obviously spheres are more complex than many other shapes, however the performance hit seems to be disproportionately large, either that or for some reason LOD isn't reducing the complexity as it should be on my system, and thus it is causing the game to slow down considerably, which in turn seems to trigger packet loss to increase even when using "Run multiple threads" on the First-Look viewer.