Rainy zones causing long loading times and bad lag

Every time I load into a zone (for the first time) where it's raining it takes really long to load now. Like usually there's only a couple of seconds left on the grace timer and then it takes a bit for the game to stabilize and act normally. It was not like this until version 1.2.

I upgraded my video card a month or two ago and it made the game run much better... until now.

PLEASE give us an option to disable the weather or fix whatever you did in 1.2 to make it worse. I'm really worried that I'm going to have a loading screen death one of these days (I'm playing in Beyond)

Yeah I use the steam version

"

Drakier wrote:

Have you recently verified your cache/installation for Path of Exile within Steam?

Didn't know that was a thing, but I just did it now. "All files successfully validated."

edit: I went ahead and updated my video drivers just now too. They weren't outdated much but figure it's worth a shot

It's still terrible after updating my drivers. And I have to repeat that it was not like this until Forsaken Masters came out. Even just sitting in Lioneye's Watch my FPS is constantly going up and down and lagging my computer. It was not like this before!

I've done a complete reinstall for the Steam version, deleting any files that were leftover after uninstalling.

I turned off shadows (this doesn't seem to matter much off or on Low setting)

I turned off antialiasing. Texture quality down to Medium.

Disabling the "Post Processing" option has helped with the FPS crashing, but the load times are still terrible in rainy zones. It usually takes just under 20 seconds, and just now it took me 30 seconds to load into a Docks zone with a party. That's not acceptable because I am playing on Beyond.

Right now I'm turning texture quality down to 2 in the config file, and switching to "2x anisotropic filtering"

I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO DO THIS. I never had issues like this before Forsaken Masters.