Thank you for the response! All my scenes are lit by dynamic light only (for a multitude of reason) - but I use Raytraced shadows for most of my large interior lights just because I find them to look better - especially in dim lighting where you can’t really notice the resolution artifacts. And the performance gain is great as well. But I checked every mesh in the scene (I wish I could check the Distance Field resolution in the asset matrix 
), and they all had a resolution of 1. The curious thing for me is that once I remove my NPC’s from the scene, the distance field rendering time drops down to sub millisecond times. But if I disable ‘Cast Shadows’ on their mesh, the lag is still there. However, if I remove their helmets (a 9K tri mesh), then the UpdateGlobalDistanceFieldVolume rendering time drops down to 4ms. I’m just not sure what’s going here because all of what I’ve described worked fine a week ago and then all of a sudden, it started lagging heavily. I thought that it might have had something to do with the 4.11.1 update, but I don’t see anything in the changelog that would imply anything having to do with distance fields.
I ran some tests in a clean map and clean third person example project just to see what the issue might be. I think there is something wrong with either my setup of distance fields, or distance field shadows as a whole in 4.11. Here is a comparison between my 4.10 and my 4.11 using raytraced shadows. The cubes are the standard cubes UE4 comes with and the artifacts are there even if I remove all the NPC’s from the 4.11.2 version.
4.10.4:
4.11.2:
Are those artifacts to be expected? Or is there something I’ve done wrong here?