Running PoE on skylake CPU without a GPU

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SL4Y3R wrote:

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CyberCrow wrote:

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Nephalim wrote:

I never found out if POE was more cpu or gpu intensive but i can tell you that pretty much any system will go to 5 fps if you shatter a large enough pack with herald of ice.

Deffo more GPU intensive than CPU.

This is not correct.

Are there any related threads testing either? Primarily how well a machine can handle herald of ice a fracturing map.

Last year I bought a new Alienware. I immediately installed and played POE with my ST-CoC character. It was fine, but I was a bit disappointed that it didn't run any better than on my old computer.

Fast forward a couple months, and I notice on the POE video options that I've been using on-board graphics from my motherboard. I apparently never updated my drivers, so it wasn't even using my video card (AMD R9 290).

After updating and swapping to my graphics card, I never looked back. Everything was so beautiful and crisp. The best word to describe it is that my CoC spells "flowed" out of my character.


The moral of this story:
Not sure how different my specs are from yours, but on-board graphics was usable and graphic card was insane.

Any built-in gpu inside the processor isn't going to be fast enough for the PoE graphics engine. You must have some kind of separate GPU. For example I run PoE on this:

MSI Hawk Radeon 6870
930 Mhz gpu core (AMD BARTS)
1120 Stream (Shader)processors: 56 Texture units + 32 ROPs)
1GB GDDR5 4200 MHz Memory = 1050 Mhz clock speed = 134.4 memory bandwidth
256-bit memory bus interface
PCIe 16x

Intel Skylake GPU
1150 Mhz gpu core (HD 530 GTS2 = Gen9)
4.2 GHz core speed = 1600 MHz DDR3/L or 2133 MHz DDR4 memory speed
24 EUs (Intel's eqivanlent to ROPs maybe sort of? apples/oranges comparison)
   (contrast 24 EUs to the i5-5775C with 48 EUs {Iris Pro})

I think the 3DMark scores state it very plainly:

Intel HD 530 3DMark Score = 50
MSI Hawk HD6870 = 3006

My MSI Hawk HD6870 is old and slow by today's modern gpu:

AMD Radeon R9 Fury X = 18840
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 = 18740


Botton line is there are no Intel or AMD processors that you can just use the built-in gpu to play PoE. It will never work.

Note:I'm waiting until next year when the 2nd generation of HBM video cards come out to upgrade my video. HBM 2.0 with 4096 memory bus and 4 GB or 8 GB of Vram is going to really boost gpu performance. When that happens all current gpu's will be phased out and some really sweet sales will show up.

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Arrowneous wrote:

Any built-in gpu inside the processor isn't going to be fast enough for the PoE graphics engine. You must have some kind of separate GPU. For example I run PoE on this:

MSI Hawk Radeon 6870
930 Mhz gpu core (AMD BARTS)
1120 Stream (Shader)processors: 56 Texture units + 32 ROPs)
1GB GDDR5 4200 MHz Memory = 1050 Mhz clock speed = 134.4 memory bandwidth
256-bit memory bus interface
PCIe 16x

Intel Skylake GPU
1150 Mhz gpu core (HD 530 GTS2 = Gen9)
4.2 GHz core speed = 1600 MHz DDR3/L or 2133 MHz DDR4 memory speed
24 EUs (Intel's eqivanlent to ROPs maybe sort of? apples/oranges comparison)
   (contrast 24 EUs to the i5-5775C with 48 EUs {Iris Pro})

I think the 3DMark scores state it very plainly:

Intel HD 530 3DMark Score = 50
MSI Hawk HD6870 = 3006

My MSI Hawk HD6870 is old and slow by today's modern gpu:

AMD Radeon R9 Fury X = 18840
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 = 18740


Botton line is there are no Intel or AMD processors that you can just use the built-in gpu to play PoE. It will never work.

Note:I'm waiting until next year when the 2nd generation of HBM video cards come out to upgrade my video. HBM 2.0 with 4096 memory bus and 4 GB or 8 GB of Vram is going to really boost gpu performance. When that happens all current gpu's will be phased out and some really sweet sales will show up.

I have the same card and you would think it would be enough to run poe w/o dramatic fps spikes.

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Nephalim wrote:

I have the same card and you would think it would be enough to run poe w/o dramatic fps spikes.

 Yes, many games from D3:RoS to Skyrim to first person shooters, etc. run well on my MSI Hawk HD6870. GGG explained years ago why at the beginning of PoE development (2006-2007) they couldn't afford the multi-100K costs to licence a commercial graphics engine such as the Unreal Engine so GGG had to develop their own and thus today we are saddled with a great looking but poor performing PoE. I do know that GGG is incrementally improving their game engine as time resources allow but in the end we will never have a great smooth running (high frame rate all the time) PoE.

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Arrowneous wrote:

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Nephalim wrote:

I have the same card and you would think it would be enough to run poe w/o dramatic fps spikes.

 Yes, many games from D3:RoS to Skyrim to first person shooters, etc. run well on my MSI Hawk HD6870. GGG explained years ago why at the beginning of PoE development (2006-2007) they couldn't afford the multi-100K costs to licence a commercial graphics engine such as the Unreal Engine so GGG had to develop their own and thus today we are saddled with a great looking but poor performing PoE. I do know that GGG is incrementally improving their game engine as time resources allow but in the end we will never have a great smooth running (high frame rate all the time) PoE.

I had no idea about that. Hmmm, I suppose it would be impossible to rebuild the game's graphical engine even with the wealth and success poe has garnered for them.

Regardless, removing ground effects from the game completely, enabling the option to turn off or reduce spell effects (firestorm,discharge,herald of ice nova) would dramatically improve the game for many players who can run vastly heavier titles without issues.

I recently bought a gtx 970 using the best and only ips 144hz monitor on the market and sadly even this is not enough to stop ridiculous fps spikes from 120 fps to literally zero. is my i2500k the bottleneck or is it simply impossible to play poe with fps spikes caused by excessive skill animations like herald of ice?

Thanks for all the insightful replies, appropriately enough I can only see every 3rd or 4th letter of what Iam typing here.. agh..

I think what I will do is buy a decent card, prob a 970, to consumate the pc. I'll run poe with the caard both enabled and diabled, and report back on the difference! I want to do some video work on the system too so will need a card anyway.

Thanks agin (and thnks for moving threada).

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SL4Y3R wrote:

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CyberCrow wrote:

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Nephalim wrote:

I never found out if POE was more cpu or gpu intensive but i can tell you that pretty much any system will go to 5 fps if you shatter a large enough pack with herald of ice.

Deffo more GPU intensive than CPU.

This is not correct.

Thats the good thing of not posting proof ;)

It is correct.

I don't really find PoE to be lopsided in either CPU or GPU usage like some games can be. I have an i5-2500k clocked at 4.2ghz and a GTX 970, I get about 50% CPU usage and around 40% GPU gaming at 1080p@144hz.

I can now report back on my experience. In summary - it's not possible to play PoE properly using only on-board skylake graphics, but for an unforeseen reason.

I ran PoE on the following computer using only the onboard graphics: intel skylake i6700k 4 GHz, 16 gb 2400 MHz RAM, SSD, Windows 7.



I was getting about 33 fps walking around highgate, very playable. Dropped to about 19 fps when killing monsters in party of 3 running dry lake without laggy builds. This is ok, but not quite as good as I thought it might be, and I'm sure I would have been in the low single digits with a good laggy build party.

But the real problem was this. The gamma is completely wrong (dark) when playing PoE. There is no gamma slider in the game to correct it, and turning the monitor gamma to max did not improve things much. In weavers caverns I could not even see my character, it was that dark.. I looked for an online solution, but there was no simple one to be found.

I installed an asus gtx970 and the gamma problems disappeared. Game runs at 60 fps, dropping to mid 30s under 6 player party conditions where laggy builds are in play. Getting fps to drop any further requires some serious effort.

The improvement over my old department store laptop is too big to even bother describing.

Incidentally, if you do build a skylake computer, avoid asus motherboards, I have a Z170 pro gaming and it has issues with RAM compatibility, asus is failing to address the issue despite multiple bios patches. My parts provider told me gigabyte are much better.