Updating from 2017 into 2019 - are there any significant animator performance possibilities?

Hi,

We are updating from 2017.4 into 2019.4 LTS, our game is an open-world MMORPG and so we cannot clamp the number of players can see on his screen, and moment, where those are 200+ players, is not that random.

Players get a few skinned equipment parts and few layers on the animator playing at once. At 2017 we were able to stop playing some layers of animator, animation events and as we were not really using physics on the client-side we were setting fixed updates as 1/3 of update time and playing further animators on the fixed update for the performance reasons.

Still, animators were one of our biggest bottlenecks when so many characters were seen at once - are there are significant updates on that matter at 2019.4? I am almost sure I have seen an article about doing slower animator updates related to distance using the PlayerLoop system, but couldn't find it once more - do anyone has experience with that?

Thanks in advance!