Unusual performance degradation

On a system with a NVME SSD, I am taking 30-45 seconds to zone into a new instance, or any shared instance.

Last time I played, in April 2023, zoning times were typically on the order of 5 seconds.

I've updated my graphics driver. Am running Vulcan.

As an experiment, I switched to DX11. It was significantly worse -- stuttering, low frame rates (low resolution screens also.)

So I switched back to Vulcan. Lo and behold, it started doing the same thing -- stuttering and low frame rates also.

Zoning times for both DX11 and Vulcan are the same.

I note significant disk activity going continuously while playing the game. I don't remember what it was like back in April.

Is there a way to reset all game state to the equivalent of a fresh install so I can see if that helps?

(Lowering texture/shadow and other graphics features did NOT make a visible difference in performance though image quality did suffer.)

I'm running a 2080Ti, and a CPU system about four years old. Again, 8 months ago, it was more than sufficient.

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I was able to find a reddit post. So I cleared the GLCache directory; I deleted all files in \Users\YOUR_USERNAME\AppData\Local\NVIDIA\GLCache and now we're back to normal.

Guess I got lucky. I see other people still have issues even after a cache clear.

I thought there was a clear cache button in Options but I didn't see it.

[Close this bug please]