Constant, character-killing lag spikes

Hi,

I'm having a problem with sudden, transitory lag spikes that unfortunately have a tendency to occur in situations where they can kill my character. They tend to range from 250-600ms, and most reliably occur when I open strongboxes and packs of monsters spawn.

I'm playing on a G73JH ( http://www.asus.com/us/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/G73Jh/specifications/ ) on a connection with 15mbps up, 1mbps down, and 16ms ping based on a Speedtest. The ports for PoE are forwarded on my router.

Help, please? I'll never make level 87 if I keep dying to this!

"

Drakier wrote:

it has to load them from HDD

I have Path of Exile installed on an SSD.

"

The problem is that the rendering and spawning of all the new lockbox mobs (in addition to any "traps" it has) will kill that laptop video card

No offense, but I'm not quite sure you actually know what you're talking about. The video card in a G73JH (ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870) is roughly eight and a half times more powerful than the minimum recommended spec (ATI Radeon X1950 Pro) for Path of Exile. See here: http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=526&cmp[]=1762

Take a closer look at the specifications for my system. I've seen it work smoothly on player video, so I don't see any reason why a system that's well over minimum spec for PoE can't do the same. Something is causing it, and it doesn't just happen when I open lockboxes, just most frequently/dangerously.

Regardless, I'm taking the laptop in for cleaning on Monday in case it's an overheating problem. I've already turned down the graphics options. To anyone else: What else can I do?

"

Drakier wrote:

In contrast, my GTX 770 has 1536 processing units, and a base clock speed of 1046MHz.

If you don't mind, e-peening about your system isn't incredibly helpful, although your processing units number is very, very impressive. My game isn't being slowed down by how LOLTEHAWESOME your PC is, there is (most likely) a network problem of some kind. The PCMark forums are a much better place to stroke it to your system specs, so perhaps you can try there.

Does someone more knowledgeable have any ideas? Are there any network issues I can check besides port forwarding?

Got same issues since the 1.2 update where AA was added to the GFX settings.
It randomly begins to "lag" like crazy. Most of the times it lags iam arround a master with a den, like haku or some, also by having effects on ground like chaos ground, or even chilled.

Running on AMD GFX aswell, here might be the problem, since mates with NVIDIA cards which are basicly not as strong than my AMD hasnt those issues. Overall my system is better than theirs.

Tried several GFX settings to reduce the lags. (hardly by making the game look "shit")
even by disabling Shadows + PP + Screenshake it still randomly lags.

Also the fact that u cant use V-synch managed by CCC instead of the game shows me that PoE doesnt run that well with AMD cards. (a mate told me he can use his v-synch settings done via his NVIDIA tool, leaving the checkbox blank in the ingame settings).

Just play arround with the ingame settings, maybe u can handle ur lag spike after all to a playable state.

"

Got same issues since the 1.2 update where AA was added to the GFX settings.
It randomly begins to "lag" like crazy. Most of the times it lags iam arround a master with a den, like haku or some, also by having effects on ground like chaos ground, or even chilled.

Running on AMD GFX aswell, here might be the problem, since mates with NVIDIA cards which are basicly not as strong than my AMD hasnt those issues. Overall my system is better than theirs.

Thanks Doeboy, that's really helpful! The issue you're having sounds very, very similar to mine. I'll try searching/making a report on the bug forums to see if anyone else is having the same issue as well. It may be something related to that that's fixable.

"

Myrkabah wrote:

"

Got same issues since the 1.2 update where AA was added to the GFX settings.
It randomly begins to "lag" like crazy. Most of the times it lags iam arround a master with a den, like haku or some, also by having effects on ground like chaos ground, or even chilled.

Running on AMD GFX aswell, here might be the problem, since mates with NVIDIA cards which are basicly not as strong than my AMD hasnt those issues. Overall my system is better than theirs.

Thanks Doeboy, that's really helpful! The issue you're having sounds very, very similar to mine. I'll try searching/making a report on the bug forums to see if anyone else is having the same issue as well. It may be something related to that that's fixable.

Due browsing the forum many ppl seems to have those issues since the 1.2 update. also a big post on reddit has been made.
The only option we got is to turn down the setting till it's playable for us and w8 for updates in the upcoming patches - hopfully there will be some :(

okay Sir i got an update on this one.

Since it's killing me a bit to play a game at lower settings than max i tried a lot of things.

I found a solution, atleast for me how to play lagfree.
my ingame settings are all max 1080p + max details on everything, PP, Shake enabled, vsync disabled!

vsync disabled: here comes the interesting part. Poe Doesnt seem to get the right monitor settings here anyway, since i was changing my monitor settings from 60Hz to 50Hz. Reason for this was simply some tearing - will come to that point in a bit.

fact is PoE w/o vync is burning ur hardware, atleast it feels like it - my gfx fan is killing my head^^.

so i chose to use a tool to limit my fps to a fixed amount.(PoE vsync is using 60 fps cap, means 60Hz monitor)

CCC allowes u to customize profiles. But doesnt work for PoE > meeeh :'(
So here we are in use of something else. I was talking to mates about tools which are able to control ur fps. Pretty simple since every capturing tool does that!
Now we got a lot of tools in the web which can be used for screen capturing, i took a tool called bandicam. pretty simple, selfxplaining, freeware ( can also be purchased to remove the watermark and longer vids etc blabla - we want fps limiter nothing else^^)

so i installed this tool. setting my fps to 60 - running the game. fps was capped at 60, pretty constant. Next to it i was monitoring my gpu stats. load arround 40% - RAM used arround 800.. pretty solid @ 60°c. ( 4x% fanspeed)
now i got some tearing :'( -> made me chose other fps limit. but everything not 60 seems to be not that fluend. So i thought, hey lets breake down the Hz of our base monitor settings (@ CCC). 60Hz 1080p into 50Hz 1080p.


limiter placed at 50FPS - and vola tearing isnt at 50FPS, my load went also a bit down, same as the fan speed etc. iam stable at that FPS even with all settings to max and i can finally enjoy playing w/o getting eyecancer :P

the bug arround some masters appearing in maps will be still there. but general play is possible - what good at some point!