Performance Issues GTX 970 Please Help

I am having major fps drop in party play especially but even playing solo sometimes dropping below 20 fps. Having vsync on or off , shadow quality etc does not seem to make a difference.

PC Specs : 3.2 ghz quad core cpu, GTX 970 4 gb gpu, 16 gb system ram
I also ran a dxdiag in hopes that someone can help me figure out which part of my PC setup is not up to par here. Nvidia GeForce Experience wants to optimize the game for me having everything maxed out but clearly I cannot.

dxdiag info is saved to pastebin @ http://pastebin.com/JxCQ1kdY

Thank you in advance for any help you can give! Been troubleshooting for a good week now and this is driving me crazy ><

I have same problems with gtx 970, this game is poorly optimized, you can do nothing

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Drakier wrote:

Also make sure you have the problem video adapter and monitor configuration,

Drakier what did you mean by this? Was there something you noticed from the dxdiag that made you write this? I have tried all the other things you mentioned.

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Drakier wrote:

I meant to check the Video options inside of the game options and verify that it is on the correct monitor selection as well as the video card is properly named.

I've seen issues where these have been wrong and have caused issues... usually manually changing them fixes the issues, or renaming/deleting the production_Config.ini file.

yep i double checked that Drakier and it's correct. I also went out on a limb today and bought an ssd and am running the game from that now...made zero difference in performance except maybe a bit faster loading times.

i'm watching resource monitor on my 2nd screen as i play the game during these dips where i'm sub 20 fps and my cpu usage never goes above 60% with pathofexile averaging around 40%.

asking around in game the advice that i'm getting is that the cpu (amd athlon II x4 650) is what's bottlenecking me

I'm in the process of going scorched earth as a last resort. Completely fresh installing Windows 10 onto my SSD along with PoE. Will report in later with results.

Made zero difference >< Display settings don't seem to matter either even at lowest settings still dipping sub 20 fps. Testing all settings individually I guess I could say shadows can vary by a few fps.

Your cpu never goes above 60%? I use a 3.2 ghz quad core as well. I set the affinity to run on 2 cores though. In my experience quad core doesn't help, tri core will have a slight effect on the third core. Dual core works the best. 80 and 40 usage respectively on the 2 cores for me. (Don't want to offend you, but make sure you are looking at per core usage and not total.)

I know you have SSD, but you have enough ram to do a ramdisk. Have you tried that?

I believe the usual test for a CPU bottleneck is to check frames while lowering your screens resolution. If lowering the resolution doesn't result in substantial increase in FPS, then you usually have a CPU bottleneck.

The only other things I can think of that might help are graphics drivers (newest is not always best) and motherboard drivers.

*Secretly, I feel like something is messed up on GGG end. Or the game simply does not like AMD hardware. Neither of these helps you though, just a fellow system tweaker that feels your pain.

@Opinionated yeah i have tried setting affinity even or odd cores etc. Ramdisk i was gonna try but i feel that a fresh install of OS and PoE from SSD is nearly equal. Drivers i guess i have not tried going back to earlier editions but (most troubleshooting steps i have researched is "make sure to have latest update on graphics driver) Thank you for input. I truly want to get to the bottom of this so any help is appreciated

edit: forgot to add that i have tried different resolutions and it really has made no noticeable difference (base resolution that i'm talking about though is 1920x1080)