Graphics options for those without supercomputers

When I read about you guys working on performance, I was stoked. But when I tried the new dx11 client any performance improvement was more than undone by my inability to turn shadows off. Why can't I? Cannot think of a single reason you would not let us turn off shadows. Usually, I run about as fast as my connection (which is crap right now), so I am at 60 fps when there is little going on, but particles are particularly brutal (think that is the type of effect). Maps with burning ground drops my MAX fps to 20, and I lose 10 fps around any shrine I haven't yet gotten (with the auras around mons). For a couple examples.

And breaches... don't even get me started.

I understand your target audience has a lot of disposable income... but many of us don't (even if we do buy some points here or there), and having better low end options would do nothing except make many of us happy (I mean, your whales are hardly gonna comlain). Disabling particle effects, and lighting effects, should be pretty simple toggles to add (as well as no shadows in dx11).

So Jonathan kind of addressed this the last time he was on the podcast. He seems a bit dismayed at being somewhat held back by having to support the game running on low end/old machines. It seems unfair that the devs would have the limit their design in order to support the game on machines that people really need to upgrade. It is a catch 22. On the one hand, obviously GGG doesn't want to alienate any of their audience, common sense. At the same time, it isn't fair that they should be expected to lower their design to accommodate people whose machines don't meet the requirements.

I don't understand how it holds back the anything to have, say, an option to disable shadows.

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Docbp87 wrote:

So Jonathan kind of addressed this the last time he was on the podcast. He seems a bit dismayed at being somewhat held back by having to support the game running on low end/old machines. It seems unfair that the devs would have the limit their design in order to support the game on machines that people really need to upgrade. It is a catch 22. On the one hand, obviously GGG doesn't want to alienate any of their audience, common sense. At the same time, it isn't fair that they should be expected to lower their design to accommodate people whose machines don't meet the requirements.

I find this humorous considering they only just released a dx11 render and a 64 bit client. It is a good idea to make sure your game can be played on a variety of machines with up to 10 year old tech. Customers being able to play your game on most tech increases your audience without sacrificing certain things like difficulty to only reach certain categories of gamers...

I think the point however, and another reason Johnathans comments are humorous, is even when you have a very good PC with mid to high range tech that would play other games like Witcher 3, Skyrim, GTAV, at a perfect 60 fps, you still have issues playing PoE.

You don't need a super computer, you just need a decent card. I ran the game just fine a couple years ago on a computer I built in 2011. I still use the same computer now but I upgraded the video card and hard drive in 2015 (still have the original CPU, motherboard, and RAM from 2011).

GGG doing all they can, but they limited by money and developers that doing multiple work at the same time, so more money => more developers => better performance.

I think GGG should add more stuff that players would buy to get more money and make game more newbie friendly for more fresh players.

WoW runs on low end machines and it has 10 million people playing it :D

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BestMageKR wrote:

WoW runs on low end machines and it has 10 million people playing it :D

will GGG be able to understand what we are showing?

this game is poorly optimized

Out of curiosity what are your specs?

Because if you have a Dell from 2009, we are gonna have beef lol.

But no seriously, lots of people have unreal expectations about how long a developer should cater to some ancient PC from 1999. Gaming has never been for the poor. Just gotta deal with it. I mean lots of people here, even prominent streamers, don't even have SSDs. Like those have been pretty much a standard in computers since like 2012. And here we are less than a month away from 2017 :0

I have a 2.4ghz with 8 gigs of ram. the video card only has 500mB on board, but it should be good enough to run a game that is several years old I figure.