Substantially lower FPS in dense forests, improved by increasing FOV

Generally, when ran in a window at the resolution recommended for my GPU (1366x768), SE2 runs acceptably well in the majority of situations: On a creative save, I got 60-70 fps while on the starting station, 50-60 fps when looking in and around the red ship, 50-70 as I flew towards Verdure (highest when not looking directly at it, even when looking at other planets or Palatine) with little to no difference when in its ring, and 30-50 while in its atmosphere and close to the surface. None of these values, although occasionally lower than the standard 60, deter me from engaging in their respective activities. However, when inside any area highly populated with trees, I begin to experience ~18 fps despite nothing else, not even the grass, showing to be intensive to that degree. I had known this for a while, but it was not until recently that I had discovered something strange;

At first I though to reduce my FOV to limit the amount of trees on screen at a time, but to my surprise, that made it worse. I then turned it all the way up, and even more surprisingly, the framerate increased from 18-19 to 22; a 4-3 fps increase by doing what might ordinarily be less performant; The two pictures show a comparison. (For those who don't know, fps is labelled "Render Frequency" and is near the center of the Performance readout)

Specs:

AMD Ryzen 5 7640HS w/ 6 cores & 12 threads, Radeon 760M Graphics @ 4.3 GHz, 6 GB

25.8 GB RAM, 4.8k MT/s

Windows 11 Pro version 25H2 build 26200.8457

It may be partially below minimum, but as I said, most of the game in its current state does run well enough for me to consider this a standout case.