ATI HD 5870 from 63 fps to 1 fps in large groups/docks issue solved with workaround

In another post, I made an aside, saying "(this may not even have anything to do with ATI)." I thought I'd test that out.

I opened performance monitor while running the game, and first visited normal areas where I get 60-63 fps (using the F1 monitor in game). I watched my disk, CPU, network traffic, and had GPU-Z open watching my gpu. I then visited various areas where I see issues. Mostly in act 3 - the sewers with posion bombs (fps issues, not chaos damage issues), the Docks (worst of all), and a couple other indoor places where issues arise while in a group. I was running with a group of 6 people and there was a summoner. I use lightning strike, and someone was using lightning arrow. I notice these to be the worst circumstances for this stuttering/unusability.

I noticed that in the times where I would get 1 frame every 5 seconds, vs. my usual 45-63 fps, my hard drive was freaking out. In perfmon, if you see a response time >20ms on a disk request, it means poor performance in a game. I had 5 different threads with response times of ~50ms. They were all hitting the same folder under the game install folder: ShaderCache.

This is the third game where something like this has happened, so I wasn't too surprised to see this happening. Despite a fast graphics card, i7, 16GB RAM, I have the biggest POS HDD possible. It's 5400 RPM.

This solution requires at least about 2G of RAM to be free on your system. On Windows 7, Hit CTRL+Shift+Esc to open task manager or ctrl+alt+delete and open it, then on your Performance tab, look under Physical Memory at "Free" after a fresh reboot. If this number isn't at least 2-3 GB I wouldn't even try a RAM disk. If "Cached"/"Available" is over 3GB, you'll probably still be OK. I won't go into detail about what these mean, but google SuperFetch if you want to know.

So here's what I did:

Mounted a RAM disk that is 1500 MB (The entire cache folder was ~70MB, so this is probably way overkill if you wanna try a smaller RAM disk or if you don't have much RAM free)
Made a symlink from the RAM disk to the ShaderCache folder

Voila. Game still stutters a tiny bit, but I went from 1 frame per 5 seconds for up to 30 seconds to a 500ms stutter. Made a world of difference.

Here's a post another PoE user made on making a RAM disk for the whole game. Since that's not really feasible for most, and I simply refuse to put the entire game in RAM myself, I suggest trying just the ShaderCache folder first:

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/34976/page/1

This is the thread on a different forum with the instructions I personally followed a couple months ago on a different game. This guy even tells you how you can setup a batch file where you can just right click -> Run as Administrator on startup so you don't have to laboriously remount and make a link every restart.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=154568

i have xfx 5850's and have the same problem

i've tried everything... it's just a problem with GGG's poor optimization for AMD cards.

oh well. just gotta suck it up until they fix it... which could be never :D

"

geniusbean wrote:

i have xfx 5850's and have the same problem

i've tried everything... it's just a problem with GGG's poor optimization for AMD cards.

oh well. just gotta suck it up until they fix it... which could be never :D

This post is about the fix I used, because I know other ATI users have the same issue. Try mounting the RAM Drive if you have a little bit of RAM free and see if it doesn't help. Do you have a SSD?