Bitter Cynic

First: If you'd try to actually help rather than writing me off as just a whiner then you'd notice the part "with OR WITHOUT optifine". I only mentioned it in case someone would suggest using that mod as a possible solution to this issue.

Or in other words. Clean Minecraft install with no mods has poor performance when rendering a large number of item frames. Changing settings has no noticeable effect. At present the only solution is not to use item frames defeating the purpose of this item existing in the game.

It's 2017 and seems like this issue will never go away. A select few including the devs likely have no problems with large amounts of entities due to their top shelf hardware. My Xeon W3520 4C/8T CPU even overclocked to 3.5Ghz tanks to 10fps in an area with just over 500 rendered item frame entities, changing any settings with or without optifine has next to no effect.
I'd like to request options for tweaking entity render distance and amount especially for item frames. I'm sure the vast majority of players would greatly benefit from this whether they themselves build large storage areas with many item frames or encounter similar set ups while visiting servers.