, have you tried using Steempipe's water shader from 2004? After adding a alpha channel to the used skybox texture it looks pretty good. Also somewhat supports shade-c evo's lights and shadows if you make its transparent enough.

, yes I also set "max_bones = 1;" before the change which already helped a bit, and I must say I am using some high poly models. Like 1 with even ~12500 faces. Also, I only set it for entities like player, enemies, allies etc (entities that move around) cause I noticed it created a visible hole/glitch in a static wall model (not sure if this impacts the speed, probably not).