PoE's performance is poor for a lot of people

"

johnKeys wrote:

I'm just waiting for Slayer to show up, and say "what performance issues?".
he never misses a thread like this.

people just power through it with monstrous gaming PCs, which typically run games 3x as graphically intensive at 5x the frame-rate, so it is hard for them to notice Path Of Exile's hiccups and speed bumps.
but I notice. every single one. because my hardware is pretty much the opposite of powerful.
and it's genuinely hard to play like this, especially considering despite all the on-paper enhancements of The Awakening, 1.3 actually was more stable by comparison, for me at least.

at this point, I'm not sure GGG can or even want to mess with the ugly and messy depths of their 5-year-old code.
they are probably thinking "it's 2015 and people have SSDs, Core i7s, blazing-fast RAM, water-cooled GPUs with an amount of cores that puts 1990s super-computers to shame... they will get over it".

I'm here to remind them not everyone can.
and honestly, even if I could it'd be really difficult to overlook that Runtime Exception which has become my best friend since 2.0.
my personal travel agent back to the Windows Desktop.

You know me all too well. :)

Usually though, I watch these threads carefully for the amount of misinformation that's bound to occur. Now, to get started:

GPUs don't really matter here. Any mid to decent one is fine. In saying that, NVIDIA is better. This isn't because their GPUs are better, it's their drivers, and most likely, just simply that the engine prefers it. This happens in A LOT of games. Shadow of Mordor being a popular recent example. This game HEAVILY favors AMD hardware. BF series usually prefers NVIDIA. But to get back to this game; this game was written and developed using NVIDIA GPUs (The rumor goes). So, ya. NVIDIA is better here. And no, you don't need some new high end GPU to do fine. Anything above like a x40/50 is fine. Probably 440+ though (a guess).

Next, CPUs and SSD reign supreme. Specifically, CPUs with high single threaded performance. This is true for a wide variety of games. Only games that are coded for parallel processing work better on AMD. Specifically, things like viedo processing. Otherwise, Intel is king. AMD is utterly disappointing in this department. This website shows many CPUs tested @stock. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html.

Onto SSDs. Nothing really to explain here. They're pretty cheap now, and are without a doubt the best possible $/upgrade you can buy. The gain here is more about "loading lag". Coming from boxes, summoners, certain mobs... It's deadly stuff.

RAM- 8GB. Speed doesn't matter.

OS- 64-bit

P.S. Ground effects are *most likely* CPU bound. I've also come to notice this game has an awful time with drawing different objects on an elevation. That will lag even my computer. It's most evident in maps like Springs. Springs with ground effects is awful.

^ GPU pixel fillrates are actually fairly critical, they determine how fast the card can overlay the layers of shaders in a party to render all the effects going on. If this were a multithreaded app (out of sync rendering), allows us to drop some effects, or one that can be set to frameskip as needed it wouldn't be as critical as it is.

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Jiero wrote:

^ GPU pixel fillrates are actually fairly critical, they determine how fast the card can overlay the layers of shaders in a party to render all the effects going on.

The effects, while displayed via the GPU, need to be drawn first.... You can always tell how little a GPU is stressed in this game just by watching a monitor. It's hilarious. It sips power, and is almost idle (I do have a high end gpu). But the point is, this game's background is basic. There are no insane textures like in Mordor or W3. It's not GPU dependent.

"

SL4Y3R wrote:

"

Jiero wrote:

^ GPU pixel fillrates are actually fairly critical, they determine how fast the card can overlay the layers of shaders in a party to render all the effects going on.

The effects, while displayed via the GPU, need to be drawn first.... You can always tell how little a GPU is stressed in this game just by watching a monitor. It's hilarious. It sips power, and is almost idle (I do have a high end gpu). But the point is, this game's background is basic. There are no insane textures like in Mordor or W3. It's not GPU dependent.

Except.... that old pentium 4 can still run this game, that slow ide hard drive still operates for a lot of the game, that ddr2 ram still manages this game. The GPU fillrates has always been the bottleneck in every system I tried (as long as it didn't have a top of the line card). It hits a cap, as it IS a 32 bit app... at which point the return is less then that SSD. It won't stress the card, as it's not really demanding power or heavy rendering. It's demanding the ability to refresh and output the info from the cores fast enough and that tends to be a gpu memory speed issue.


edit - it's the difference between dragging a heavy load (rendering) and how many roads exists (fillrate). Related but not quite the same thing.



edit 2 - if you want to see this happen as a effect... play the game bloons TD and reach the high levels. It's not the graphics, it's how many things are on the screen and how the fillrate cannot keep up with refreshing it all on demand. Minimal workload, but the gpu's memory bandwidth cannot manage to update all the different layers fast enough.

"

RockGod wrote:

Sorry, it isn't settings, isn't the Video Card, it isn't unoptimized windows services, it isn't potato computers. All of those free up a little memory that is like applying band aids to a heart attack. I imaged a fresh windows installation that only runs POE from an SSD and it's still doing it.

It's something in the game code that was added during 2.0, guessing it's Netcode related.

And THAT my friends is the crux of the potato...

"

Jiero wrote:

"

SL4Y3R wrote:

"

Jiero wrote:

^ GPU pixel fillrates are actually fairly critical, they determine how fast the card can overlay the layers of shaders in a party to render all the effects going on.

The effects, while displayed via the GPU, need to be drawn first.... You can always tell how little a GPU is stressed in this game just by watching a monitor. It's hilarious. It sips power, and is almost idle (I do have a high end gpu). But the point is, this game's background is basic. There are no insane textures like in Mordor or W3. It's not GPU dependent.

Except.... that old pentium 4 can still run this game, that slow ide hard drive still operates for a lot of the game, that ddr2 ram still manages this game. The GPU fillrates has always been the bottleneck in every system I tried (as long as it didn't have a top of the line card). It hits a cap, as it IS a 32 bit app... at which point the return is less then that SSD. It won't stress the card, as it's not really demanding power or heavy rendering. It's demanding the ability to refresh and output the info from the cores fast enough and that tends to be a gpu memory speed issue.


edit - it's the difference between dragging a heavy load (rendering) and how many roads exists (fillrate). Related but not quite the same thing.



edit 2 - if you want to see this happen as a effect... play the game bloons TD and reach the high levels. It's not the graphics, it's how many things are on the screen and how the fillrate cannot keep up with refreshing it all on demand. Minimal workload, but the gpu's memory bandwidth cannot manage to update all the different layers fast enough.

Your first edit explained it :)

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Jiero wrote:

edit 2 - if you want to see this happen as a effect... play the game bloons TD and reach the high levels. It's not the graphics, it's how many things are on the screen and how the fillrate cannot keep up with refreshing it all on demand. Minimal workload, but the gpu's memory bandwidth cannot manage to update all the different layers fast enough.

That's the game engine, actually. It's not written to scale well.

I do agree with Slayer that SSD is single greatest thing that could happen to PoE. This is also strange because SSD provide such a huge quality of life improvement for a game that is 5GB in size and looks like it is from 2012, which it in fact is from :)

I tested performance of Witcher 3 installed on SSD and on my standard WD Black HDD. There was little difference I could observe once being inside and playing.

Now take PoE, which plays like night and day on and off SSD. It is crazy difference in load times and also in-game performance.

Get SSD if you are serious about PoE.

PS. this effectively makes PoE not F2P. You gotta shell out $ for that SSD first to enjoy it :)

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Baron01 wrote:

PS. this effectively makes PoE not F2P. You gotta shell out $ for that SSD first to enjoy it :)

As it was meant to be played. :)

Hasn't this been pointed out long before...

"Closest thing to going Pay to Play in Path of Exile is using an SSD"

Seriously every time I play PoE it always feels like the Devs were avid supporters of the whole "#PCMASTERRACE" thing.