Path of Exile FPS Stuttering Fix for AMD GPU

Hi everyone! I'm not claiming this will work 100% for everyone but after a lot of search and try it worked for me.

My Rig:
● 8 GB Ram
● Radeon R9 380 Nitro 4GB
● 1TB HDD
● Ivycore i5 3570k (working at 3.8Ghz)

Not the best but should be good enough for PoE

I came back to Path of Exile for Patch 2.4.0 (Last content I played was Perandus league) to find myself struggling with the problem that the FPS would stutter a lot or would just randomly get stuck at 15-20 in standby zones and doing nothing.



As you can see at the lower right corner, I'm using MSI AB to track my GPU usage and temperatues to make sure everything was working properly. I'm playing at 1080p with every setting at max. This didn't happen in the past and like everyone else I thought this might be an issue related to GGG.



I tried lots of stuff, changing my energy settings to maximum performance, settings in Radeon's Crimson Catalyst Center since they were forcing their own paramenters to:

● Anisotropic Filtering Mode: Use Application Settings
● Anti-Aliasing Mode: Use Application Settings

And still nothing was helping with the problem. I even tried another user fix where you would create a profile for Path of Exile and turn On the Shader Cache. Worked for a few people, not for me.

Even tried playing in a lower resolution with every setting to the minimum, stutter would still happen.

The solution to all this? Simple. Apparently AMD likes to screw with people with their settings. The problem for me was that the Core Clock was getting downclocked while playing so instead of the usual 1010 Mhz that are the standard settings, I was getting 300-500 which are the idle settings causing the massive fps drop and stuttering.

The fix is easy, inside the Radeon Settings > Gaming > Global Settings, you have to turn off Power Efficiency, which focus more on power saving at the cost of performance.

I'm now happily playing at constant 60 fps, maybe some random fps drop to 57 but nothing major like before. Malachai's 3rd Heart phase is working just wonderful.

Hope this works for other people as well. It was a dumb thing, but the dumbest things sometimes are the hardest ones to notice.

P.S: In case you use MSI AB and your GPU Usage looks like this:



I fixed it by turning "Enable unified GPU usage monitoring" inside the Settings > General tab.

Cheers! Sorry for the long post!

Edit:

Pre-Fix:



Post-Fix:



Some Images for my current build and FPS logs:



Note: Path of Exile FPS shows some variation between 56-63 while MSI AB is a constant 60 FPS.

Be sure to be playing in Fullscreen mode, also disabling Vsync can help a few other people or what not.

If this solution doesn't work for you, get Clockblocker.

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Hellanoid wrote:

inside the Radeon Settings > Gaming > Global Settings, you have to turn off Power Efficiency

Awesome, sure to help others. Thanks! :-)