Compatibility/Performance issues with (decent) Optimus laptops

Hi! I've been playing PoE since the Open Beta launch and i've always had minor issues regarding speed or performance. I have a year old Lenovo laptop with the infamous Optimus (2 GPUs), i can run Bioshock Infinite and Battlefield 3 on medium+ with 30 or more FPS, but when playing Path of Exile i suffer from major slowdown.

Specs:
i5 3210M CPU @2.5GHz (ivy bridge, overclocked)
Nvidia GeForce GT630M with 1GB, DDR3 i believe (and on-board Intel HD4000)
4GB RAM, plenty of HDD space
Windows 7 64-bit OS
10 Mbit broadband internet


I manually select the game to run with the high performance card at every startup, yet loading takes 20 seconds on average. Other load times in the game usually hover around 6-8 seconds (what is this).

When set to max graphics settings, the game is almost unplayable on hardcore with a party (game freezing for a few seconds frequently). When played solo, game runs mostly steadily with 20-50 FPS varying on environment. When fighting a large horde of mobs, 0.5-1 second stutters occur so i don't dare play like this anyway.

Setting the game to lowest settings does not decrease the loading time in any manner, and the highest FPS still seems to be around 50. There are no freezes in soloplay anymore, but a screenful of mobs still causes a major slowdown to 25 FPS (especially in forest/jungle areas). In a 5man team, high usage of graphics intensive skills (GMP Lightning Strike, LA, ground ice, crit effects) still can cause massive hickups, not to mention my mini-heart attacks.


Is there anything I can do to improve performance, or does PoE really have such high system requirements?





P.S. Yes, I have tried reinstalling, it did not help.

630 is not a performance card, it's a budget card. Try turning off post-processing and see if that helps any.

Did you read the whole post?

"

Opus93 wrote:

Did you read the whole post?

Yup and was addressing a good part of it, the particle effects have extra layers that go along with the post processing effects to warp the screen, this can put a hurting on cards like you and I have and turning it off can cut down on load and gpu use.

"

Opus93 wrote:

When set to max graphics settings, the game is almost unplayable on hardcore with a party (game freezing for a few seconds frequently). When played solo, game runs mostly steadily with 20-50 FPS varying on environment. When fighting a large horde of mobs, 0.5-1 second stutters occur so i don't dare play like this anyway.
P.S. Yes, I have tried reinstalling, it did not help.

Then to clear things up, I AM playing on lowest settings, with FX turned off, and still the game runs far worse than all the newest high resource-demanding games on market.

try this. Download Nvidia Inspector

open N.Inspector and click Settings Button as you see.


second step:



After that "Apply settings" finally manually select nvida card and play.


Sorry for bad english.