Sceptre and Dominus for the FPS challenged

I had quit open beta for over three months because I had persistent framerate problems with my Radeon HD 5750. When the full release was announce, I checked the forums and learned that a beta driver for my card helped. It also looked like GGG had made some optimizations that would improve the framerate performance. And it turned out that it did. I still had some sporadic problems, but the statues didn't totally freeze me up anymore. I could sort of handle ice shot. Discharge would still put me out for about a half a second. All in all, I could deal with it. Even piety, which was a 4-5 FPS nightmare, at best before I quit, was now doable

Then I hit Sceptre of God and Dominus. Sceptre of God was just barely playable on normal. But it seems like almost every mob is designed to choke my FPS. I managed to get through it several times, but during that time, my framerate was extremely spiky, and probably averaged around 16 when running decently. That doesn't make for much fun.

I'd like to say Dominus was better, but... I got to Dominus level four times. The first two time the game disconnected on loading. The third time, I got in, put a portal up, and then froze with framerate at one for about a minute. Then the game disconnected. The fourth time, I got in, got my portal up, and even managed to get up the stairs some, at about 2-4 FPS, then I froze, and instead of disconnecting, my game program crashed completely. The first two times, I was playing solo. The last two, I was trying with a group.

If this keeps up, I will be forced to quit yet again.

GTX 550 Ti here. I hate the Dominus fight exactly because of technical problems. I'm getting FPS drops & stutering with all of his lightning attacks. On top of that the raining & blood rain considerably impacts the framerate. Thank god you only have to do it twice per char. I crashed on it only once tho.

Particle effects were always a serious issue of this game and I dunno how they still cant optimize it.

Its like someone said: the game is supereasy, the only things that can kill you are technical problems: desync, FPS drops / lag, DCs, zoning... :))

Disable shadows and post processing before entering the area, helps a little bit. What helps even more is defragmenting your content.ggpk file and after that your HDD where PoE is installed.
I have an old and compared slow PC with slow HDD and not the best internet and PoE crashed alot some time ago, but the Dominus Fight went relative smooth and stable to my surprise. Short lags when the environment changes and at the end when the portal opens but that's it.

Thanks for your response. I have a Mac, but I run PoE on Windows through Parallels. Even so, defragging the disk is not necessary on Macs.

I play with shadows on low, and all other graphics set on lowest settings. I guess I can turn the shadows off for Dominus and see if that makes a difference. In general, shadows make a gameplay difference. Often I can see the shadow of a mob before I see the mob itself.

Wish you could turn off weather effects. Every area where it rains it brings my FPS down.

Warehouses are another area where it runs like crap. Wasn't always the case, but in more recent patches it has been a concern.

As an update, I joined a group for Dominus this morning. The Sceptre of God part was passable. I had FPS of about 14 through most of it, with some spikes on the mobs that do the circular lightning, but overall it wasn't that terrible.

Again, Dominus fight was awful. I started the fight at an unplayable 2-4 FPS. Then, as things all got loaded, I got up to somewhere around 10 FPS and actually contributed a little to the fight. I could tell because I have End Charge on Stun, and I actually got a few charges up. But between a completely horrendous framerate performance, and the light show that was going on on the screen at the times when things were moving, I had absolutely no idea what was going on. A few times, I managed to locate one of the bosses and lock onto him for heavy strike.

At the Dominus finale, I died before I saw the blood rain even falling, then died immediately again on rezoning into the screen, again I think from blood rain. I had one other death earlier from the boss that, I think, was firing some sort of rapid fire incineration thing.

Even with perfect performance, I think this fight would be difficult and hair-raising. But with actual performance, the fight is ridiculous, and the only nice thing I have to say about it is that its over and I won't have to do it again for a while.

Frankly, I'm a bit surprised that GGG would create content that compounded the worst problems that I already had. For full release, I would have expected the game breaking problems to have been resolved. And in the areas that already existed, they have at least improved, even if not fully resolved. But in the new areas, they are worse than ever.

yeh, same problem here.

my pc is generaly good - my graphics card admitedly less so, but in all fairness when I can run skyrim(after modding) at 60+fps 1920x1080 then its not the pc's fault if poe stuggles to run.

I also develop in UDK on this machine, if it will handle a 3d rendering development application....

every thing is absolutly FINE, great fps with most stuff on med to high. - until I reach areas of heavy particle density, things like weather effects and some of the newer spell effects.

Ive tried turning settings down to lowest possible(800x600 ugh) and the issue persists.

particle light areas:
45+ fps irrelevant of settings

particle heavy areas:
5 to 10 fps and big spikes.

some ideas as to the cause:
I suspect the issue is that poe (or rather whatever the engine is) is processing the partice system on the cpu rather than the gpu on some cards, other wise every one would be complaining right?

are some of the new effects tagged as physx particles perhaps? or non emissives?
could it be something liek the particles replicating their position to the server and lagging out due to bottle necking?


so yeh support people - if you need things like dxdiags, driver setups etc just pm me or email me.

"another god damn bug hunt" - corporal hicks.

Another vote here for allow us to turn off weather effects and tone down special effects.

30FPS everywhere else and minimal lag or sync issues. Running on high levels

Dom I'm lucky to get 4FPS and to even see the message saying I've died before the client has registered the "return to town" click. Let alone be able to keep hitting things because of syncing issues. Running on the lowest settings I can set it to.

Same problem here. The game ran good until the end of act III.

>_>

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ozzy9832001 wrote:

Wish you could turn off weather effects. Every area where it rains it brings my FPS down.

Warehouses are another area where it runs like crap. Wasn't always the case, but in more recent patches it has been a concern.

asked for that 2 years ago answer was it would kill the atmosphere in the game