Extremely laggy gameplay due to excessive hard-disk usage

The game is basically unplayable. Once I move a few steps it's almost guaranteed the game will start loading something from hard-drive and frame-rate drops to like 0.2 FPS. So I just have to wait to finish loading stuff from HDD and then maybe I can cast a few spells before it starts HDD lagging again.

I have stopped antivirus, windows defender, and many other unneeded processes and services that might cause the problem. But I strongly believe this is PoE related only. Because it's the only game with this problem. I can play Tribes Ascend absolutely fluently, Bulletstorm too, etc... Even Diablo 3 is fluent.

If I'm lucky and the client isn't loading something from HDD, then the movement and animations are absolutely fluent. So I think this is really caused by excessive HDD access rather than bad graphics card. But I have tuned the graphics down as much as I could (even disabling v-sync, playing at 1024x768, basic shadow mapping, antialiasing off, 2x anisotropic filtering, post processing off), but it didn't helped a bit. Absolutely no improvement.

Sometimes the lag is 10 seconds long or even longer, and then 'unexpected disconnection' is almost guaranteed.

When I played during the first open beta weekend, the game was much more fluent back then. So today I tried to visit places I played during the first open beta weekend and they are laggy now too. Although the Act II seems much more laggy than Act I.

And one last bit - the client keeps forgetting when I check the 'Hide global chat' in settings. Just exit the game, start again, login, start playing my char and this particular setting is reseted.

Memory is EVERYTHING.

If your trashing your HDD, that means your lacking memory.

The systems that trash the HDD the most are LAPTOPS for several reasons....Physical RAM is low, HDD speed is 5200RPM, the onboard GPU is intergrated and generally 512mg.

Another thing that can cause system HDD trashing is Partitioning of the HDD in such a way that the head is constantly moving away from The OS, the Paging File, the Game Files.

Please post your hardware specifications.


As for the Global chat, This option used to work before 0.9.9B, I do not know what happened to screw it up, I thought they knew about it prior to the last patch 0.9.9C.

Should be fixed in next patch as it seems like it should be an easy fix....

Confirming Excessive chitching/freezes during read/writes on 0.9.9e:
- using a new skill (or one that hasn't been used in this session)
- seeing a new enemy spawn for the first time
- seeing a new enemy's special skill/attack that had not been used in this session before
- bosses death, especialy if it generates A LOT of drop

Seems to not be "beta weekend"-only issue, as I had this during this Friday as well. Never had this in any other game. D3 is also running fine on medium settings without such issues.

Specs:

There is some issues right now with fragmented memory and memory leaks in general. More memory will definantly help but I would assume with some more patches they will eventually get the memory manager running right and fix some of the leaks.

As said before, I can run many modern games fluently (on low graphics options though). So I don't think my hardware should be a problem. But anyway, here are my tech specs:

Operating System: Windows Vista™ Home Premium (6.0, Build 6002) Service Pack 2 (6002.vistasp2_gdr.120402-0336)
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6420 @ 2.13Ghz (2 CPUs), ~2.1GHz
System Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
System Model: 965P-DS3
Memory: 2046MB RAM
Page File: 2076MB used, 8100MB available
DirectX Version: DirectX 11
DxDiag Version: 7.00.6002.18107 32bit Unicode

Card name: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT
Display Memory: 1010 MB
Dedicated Memory: 243 MB
Shared Memory: 767 MB
Driver Version: 8.17.0012.9610 (most recent)

Harddisks are running at 7200rpm, but I use RAID mirroring and TrueCrypt drive-wide encryption. But again, other games do not have any problem with that.

Confirming Excessive chitching/freezes during read/writes on 0.9.9e:
- using a new skill (or one that hasn't been used in this session)
- seeing a new enemy spawn for the first time
- seeing a new enemy's special skill/attack that had not been used in this session before
- bosses death, especialy if it generates A LOT of drop

Specs:

P.S. Usually runs smoothly on highest settings

It appears the 8xxx series might be having issues. There was another thread where the 8800 was overheating.

And I cannot STRESS this enough. Yes I am on the NVIDIA FORUM...do not use yhe LATEST drivers on your old HARDWARE.

Also...Those are not your Hardware Specifications. Thats a CUT and paste from something like DXDIAG.

Hardware specification are similar to what I have in my post.

Use SPECCY is you do not know what yours.


It will look like this:

The solution with '-gc2' mentioned here:
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/31131
helps A LOT. There is still an occasional lag, but the gameplay is so much more fluid.

"

Greybear1andonly wrote:

Also...Those are not your Hardware Specifications. Thats a CUT and paste from something like DXDIAG.

Wait what? So you're suggesting DXDiag log has nothing to do with actual hardware specs? Interesting. ;) Anyways, let's not go to off-topic of 3rd party soft used in order to generate pixelated screencaps of partial hardware info, ok? :)

Back on topic, confirming '-gc2' helps a lot as Paja mentioned. Looks like compat scaling should be added by default for people with 2gb ram?

Ok so even with the newest patch the Act 2 (forest) is very laggy. Although it's quite a lot better now. So the patch did help, but did not fix the problem completely.