LAB is lagging to hell and beyond.

Just leveled to 87 and tried to make my 3rd Lab run for the ascendancy points, First areas were ok and Izaro 1st battle went ok. Then in the 2nd set of areas I got the stupid spinning spike and rumba blade traps and the server side latency went to hell and beyond:

I thought averaging 7 fps in a crypt map with 2 golems was the worst but I was wrong. PoE was down to 4 fps! Since I'm way over-leveled I could still get through the f'ckin slide show to Izaro but had to bail with unplayable slow frame rates. The most frustrating part is that I go back to my hideout and can have my golem, pet, totem, and then fire my GMP Tornado arrows and have a very smooth 60 fps (v-sync is enabled).

So that means the servers are way overloaded even more than usual. Is GGG taking some of the realm servers down from 2.6.3 and allocating them for 3.0.0 in preparation for the August 4th launch (crash) date?

With each and every new version of PoE the fps is slowly going down and tonight it was the worst I have ever seen. I guess that's what I get for investing time in a popular game from an indie company. The player base is just outpacing what GGG can deliver in terms of enough server side processing to handle the loads.

Before anyone tells me to get a better game rig my specs are:
With my 8 thread i5-870 oc'ed to 3.5 GHz (and 3.7 GHz when only 1 core is needed), 8 GB of DDR3-1600 RAM, 2 Gigabyte R270 GPU, and a 500 GB Samsung 840 SSD there is no way I have too slow a rig (no way in hell can anyone blame my gaming rig). My Comcast Internet is 90 Mb down and 12 Mb up (just ran a speed test to Miami from my home in Cape Coral FL) and WinMTR says I average 50ms Internet latency to the WDC realm (what I was playing on tonight). That only leaves the server simulation processing time as the problem.

If we can't get decent frame rates with PoE 2.6.3 then heaven help us come August 4th when the number of players wanting to play Friday will kill PoE 3.0 (that could be a black friday harbinger). This doesn't bode well at all unless GGG has many more servers going online on the 4th. This is awful and I don't see GGG informing us that there are major performance improvements coming with FoO, just some small incremental ones.

I don't need a Swig of Hope but a swig of alcohol right now (not optional).

3 problems:

1) you ASSUME it is servers while it is mostly end-client problem (if it were servers - everybody would be affected. it certainly isnt the case)

2) radeon.. we all know radeon/ati/amd cards are not game industry's fav and their power is mostly wasted by weird drivers issues. POE + AMD card is not a happy place

3) 2 gfx cards but just 8gb ram? sell one of these cards and get yourself 16gb+. it has nothing to do with your problem but you will feel the difference


find your image quality settings (drivers and in-game) and turn off all the AA options (esp the more crazy ones like temporal etc).

most likely case of what is happening is that these rolling items have something to them that makes your card die (yes, your gfx card) when trying to apply multisampling and visibility calculations. it is similar to what smoke can cause for some gfx/game combos. you run 4K game in ultra at 120fps and one puff of smoke brings that to 10fps and heavy fan noise



tech is difficult and drawing easy conclusions (teh servahs!) leads nowhere

would have been good to see the sensors tab of gpu-z to lookup the gpu load during your game time. and the cpu load.

i just changed my broken gforce780 for a gforce1070 and vsync ingame still doesn't work for me as it results in horizontal tearing when moving vertically. have to try around with driver side vsync and see if that helps as my monitor doesn't have gsync.
did you try to switch vsync off?

if the lag happens again, try a winMTR directly to the ip-address of the server you play on, you can get it from the logfile. doing so you also catch problems with ibm's internal server structure.

I can play anything from D3:RoS to War Thunder to Mech Warrior and all AAA titles run quite well on my Radeon R9 270 GPU. If GGG can't code PoE to run well on AMD GPUs with the older Catalyst or the newer Crimson drivers (which I'm using in DX9ex mode) then that is a GGG code performance problem. If the servers are overloaded then that is a GGG performance problem. If I have to turn down the quality of the graphics effects (I'm only running in medium settings) to get better fps then that is a GGG performance problem. If I have to post here that PoE performance sucks many times then that is a GGG performance problem. If I have to have an AMD RX-460 or higher or an nVidia 1060 or higher GPU just to play PoE at 40+ fps then that is a GGG performance problem.

The only way I can rule out the Crimson drivers and my Radeon R9 270 is to turn all the settings to their minimum and run the Lab and see if it is still slow (if I can get the spike traps). Like I said the first part up through and including the first Izaro battle was ok. Then in the 2nd phase when I encountered the spinning spike traps that's when the frame rate tanked. It happens every time in the trials too (but never has it crashed to single digit frame rates like it did last night).

I will dumb down every graphics quality control there is, make Lab runs, and report back.

"

vio wrote:

would have been good to see the sensors tab of gpu-z to lookup the gpu load during your game time. and the cpu load.

i just changed my broken gforce780 for a gforce1070 and vsync ingame still doesn't work for me as it results in horizontal tearing when moving vertically. have to try around with driver side vsync and see if that helps as my monitor doesn't have gsync.
did you try to switch vsync off?

if the lag happens again, try a winMTR directly to the ip-address of the server you play on, you can get it from the logfile. doing so you also catch problems with ibm's internal server structure.

Hmm... I turned on vsync when I was using an older MSI Hawk 6870 GPU because with vsync off the particle effects (opening log in screen rain for example) would drive up the 6870 GPU temps and the Twin Frozr III gpu cooling fans would rev up to very audible levels. Now with the Gigabyte R9 270 and their "Windforce" cooling the 2 cooling fans can't be heard at any time playing PoE.

So you brought up a good point and I need to turn off vsync (plus try dialing down other visual effects quality settings) and see if anything I do can improve my fps.

One thing I thought I understood but maybe I don't is the relationship of frame time and latency. I always thought that latency was the total time for a client side command to be sent to the server, the server processes that command and calculates everything from the command (such as exile and monster damage), and then the results are sent back to my client PoE so it can process the data and display the next frame. Frame time was only the time to take the data sent back and process it to generate the next frame to display. Obviously longer server side processing will result in fewer fps and if my R9 270 GPU takes too long to process the client side PoE commands then fps will drop. I'll need to experiment around to get a better understanding of where the horrid slow downs are occuring. More information is needed.

'frame time' can mean anything. without definition it is a number important mostly to the devs - just like any telemetry one has to be SURE at what he is looking at


noone denies that GGG is the final responsible party here. but you can rule out servers and move on

lags that you see are VERY frequent when you ask gfx card (or even worse - CPU) to handle blurry things VS visibility calculations AND apply any post-processing stuff like AA.

anything with any kind of transparency (like smoke or maybe a nice rotating blades or very fine sparks created by roombas) and visibility calculation can result in MASSIVE performance hit with just a small coding error in such scenario.

if you want to play with gfx settings find where you can disable AA driver-side and force that setting to override game settings

running in potato mode wont change a thing - texture quality has very little to do with AA performance. but post-processing like any form of multisampling or distortion can and will matter. disable it

and really - get yourself some more ram, it is cheap and it is the best upgrade your rig can get

frame time is the time your gpu needed to render a frame. it depends on the level of details the game engine needs to render and, if you enabled lockstep, your latency to the server as the game tries to slow down if network answers come in slowly.

frame time should always be the opposite as frames/second but this isn't always the case in poe. don't know why. would be nice to have someone from ggg explain it if they provide the details in the first place.

and there are always 2 vsync options, the one in the driver and the one in the game, the one not working for me is the latter.