How to get the best performance with older comp?

So, I love this game, but my characters get stuck on Act 3. Game runs smoothly up to that point. Then the nicer graphics, even with all settings as low as possible (and nothing running in the background) cause the game to freeze, stutter, and eventually crash after going through about 2 to 3 zones or just town portalling full of loot a few times to the vendor. So I end up having to reload the game and do places like Marketplace 5 times over before finally getting to the next zone, ect. And characters are over level 40 when beating Dominus. Which works out because they need a ton of defense to survive the massive rain lag and lieutenant lag spikes which can freeze the screen for 5 plus seconds if not outright crash the encounter (Piety encounter can be just as bad).

So, is there any tweak I can do to make this more manageable?

I do not have the money for a new comp right now and minor upgrades to this comp I don't know if it would be worth it. Double the RAM from 2k to 4k? Get a better 3d card? Wouldn't that just make the CPU the new bottleneck? Just looking for a temporary solution so this 2006 toaster can do a little better. Any advice would be appreciated, thanks in advance. Hopefully will be buying a new computer this summer before expansion is released.

Please do a dxdiag and post it in Spoiler tags here.

The biggest performance boost you could get would be installing it to an SSD.
Usually stutters are caused by disk access. Going from 2gb to 4gb ram will help but the stutters will still be a crippling performance issue.

Apparently people have had success running the entire game off ram using ramdisk software, but this requires well over 8gb ram. The game intermittently accesses content.ggpk which is a 7gb file that holds most of the game data.
If they split up content.ggpk so we could run some things in ramdisk without needing 16gb of ram that would be cool.

People will continue to defend the performance of this game despite it running well below average considering production values. I don't expect the engine will hold up with the projected 10 years of updates.

You won't get any performance benefits from upgrading to a SSD.
Besides from opening a strongbox, performance will remain the same than before because PoE doesn't read the disk much.
Lower loading times are however nice.

"

Barry wrote:

The biggest performance boost you could get would be installing it to an SSD.
Usually stutters are caused by disk access. Going from 2gb to 4gb ram will help but the stutters will still be a crippling performance issue.

Apparently people have had success running the entire game off ram using ramdisk software, but this requires well over 8gb ram. The game intermittently accesses content.ggpk which is a 7gb file that holds most of the game data.
If they split up content.ggpk so we could run some things in ramdisk without needing 16gb of ram that would be cool.

People will continue to defend the performance of this game despite it running well below average considering production values. I don't expect the engine will hold up with the projected 10 years of updates.

This post is full of win.

1) RAMDisk is your best friend (https://www.softperfect.com/products/ramdisk/)
2) Get at least 12gb RAM to be able to run a 7GB RAM drive (2gb OS + 2gb game memory + 7gb ram disk + 1gb swap).
3) Disk I/O is one of the biggest hurdles in PoE performance especially for older machines.
4) This game will never be optimized. Its simply way too poorly written from a performance game engine perspective. TO fix this would require an entire rewrite of the game engine (even in closed beta with 1/4th the items and 1/4th the skills and only 1 act it was just as bad)
5) This games graphics are already outdated anyway so turn down your visual settings and just enjoy the game for what it is: game mechanics. Not eye candy. This game is comparable to ~2006-2008 era stuff and that will never change.


For 3 years it has really confused me as to why they put so much emphasis on spell effects and such when this game is so outdated it doesnt even matter.
Nobody plays this game for eye candy - unless they havent played another game in the last 10 years - but that aspect coupled with a completely from-scratch engine that was poorly built from the beginning = what we have today.

I agree that this game will not survive the next 10 years of updates.
I just built a brand new gaming rig and the game is still crap in performance:

RAM: 32GB GSKILL 1866mhz
CPU: FX 8350 8-core 4.2ghz OC'd
GPU: R9 290 4GB
entire game is on RAMDISK, always.
i still get 30FPS in maps with summoners.
and dont even get me started on those CoC/mjolnir kind of builds.....thats 10FPS lagdom.

but oh this great game would be so awesome if we could actually enjoy all these really cool builds and effects.
i think that is why we all still play ---- because *one day* we *might* get to :)

"

darkmatch wrote:

You won't get any performance benefits from upgrading to a SSD.
Besides from opening a strongbox, performance will remain the same than before because PoE doesn't read the disk much.
Lower loading times are however nice.

an SSD upgrade from a 7200rpm HDD is not very big performance boost.
however, it is indeed noticeable and stuttering is a well-known effect of disk I/O.
i have tested this extensively for 3 years in PoE now.


however - upgrading from a standard HDD to a RAMDISK (https://www.softperfect.com/products/ramdisk/) will indeed benefit your performance greatly.
as stated - this game relies heavily on disk I/O.
it simply cannot load into memory the entire ~6gb contents.ggpk file and so it needs to do archival resource pulls from that huge file constantly.

PoE still is restricted to a sub>2GB memory map which means that in some situations when resources above 2GB are required in an instance --- you are simply SoL and it is going to really churn that disk I/O.

this is a result of poor resource management in the engine.
there is no reason why a single zone/instance would require more than 1GB of resources.

there are plenty of non-instanced games that handle this much better.

thats the problem with PoE.