In-Game Constant 1-2 Sec Screen Freezes

Hi, first of all sorry for my english I will try to do it the best I can.

I'm having problems with PoE from a long time ago, I dont remember if it was a path update or a PC update but the problem is persistent and by now I haven't found any way to solve the problem myself.

When I'm playing regardless if I'm in town or not (but in-town the problem is worst), when I'm running the screen freezes for less than a second most of the time but sometimes it freezes for a sec or even 2 in some cases, if the freeze was short nothing happens but if it was a bit more than 1 sec the game speed up to catch up with the server and this is constant, most of the time it happens when I walk far from where I'm but it also happens in the middle of any battle, that totally prohibe me from playing Hardcore and Softcore is hard to, this is not something that is happening with a lvl 110 CoC build it happens everywhere, anytime, I started a new char a few hours ago and I'm lvl 5 because I cannot play with that freezing all the time (not 1 freeze every 1 min or something like that 1 freeze every 3-5-10 seconds)

I try lots of stuff, I'm a PC technician so as far as I have tested I dont think it's a hardware nor OS problem, but I might be wrong I'm hopping that there is not a hardware problem since I saw some things that might make issues but I dont believe it is.

So I will divide this thread into sections, to give everybody as much information as I can.

Hardware Specifications:
Motherboard: MSI 970 Gaming
CPU: AMD FX 8150 3.4 Mhz 8-Core (Generic Cooler)
GPU: AMD R9 290X Tri-X Sapphire (3 Fans)
RAM: 4 Sticks Generic 2Gb Kingston DDR3 1333Mhz
HDD: WD Blue 1Tb
Screen: LG W2043S (VGA connection)

Software Specifications:
Windows 10 Home (Original)
Latest Radeon Driver

It's fair to say that I doesnt install much since the last format that was maybe 6 or less months ago, and I had the problem before the formatting too... Mmm I did the format because of the PoE problem and doesn't solve the problem, so I test the game with a fresh install.

I try erasing the Radeon Crimson Game Profile, lowering the in-game specifications to the lowest and I try switching whitin DX9 and DX11.

I try --noasync

I guess I could try to lower the graphics even lower in the .ini file but I think that my PC is good enough to at least run the game smoothly in the lowest in-game specifications.

Even with the lowest in-game specifications I run in no more than 24 FPS and sometimes 16 FPS, but I can play Batman Arkham Knight pretty well and we all know how bad is the optimization for that game is.

Sadly this hardware config is not finished, my RAM is bad (there could be a problem with the rams maybe), the CPU Cooler must be changed right now I'm in 30-35° but it jumps to 45-55 very quickly, today I have made some changes in the BIOS so the BIOS doesn't use the Turbo where the CPU goes from 3.4Ghz to 4.2Ghz because I had temps of 80° while trying to play PoE, a few minutes ago after those changes at least I can keep a constant 50-60° while "Playing", my case is not helping either since is old, heavy and warm but at least I have air conditioner (I live in Argentina so... it's hot outside.

The other sad part is that my old PC that was less than half of the power of this PC I give it to a friend and introduce him into PoE... and he can play -.-"

I will buy a SSD, a NZXT x31, 16Gbs of 1866Mhz RAMs and a new case but right now I'm not working so I must save money so I HOPE it's not a hardware related problem

I search a lot in the forums but I dont find a workaround for the problem, I hope that somebody could help me with these problem, maybe it's something about my CPU, maybe PoE is not very compatible with AMD or there is something that I could do without investing money that I dont have hehe.

Best regards everyone!

PD: I can upload a video with the problem if anyone want to see my problem if I doesn't make myself clear explaining it.

the game freezing for some time, followed by a speeding up is a clear indicator that your game client isn't receiving data from the server.

please follow the howto to make a winMTR report to your game server to have some more indicators where the problems are.

Ok I will do it, but I must say that I'm having this problem since 3 different Internet providers ago :P, today I have a very bad one that I will surelly change, before I have the same provider but with a greater speed and before that I have the best provider of my country with the greater speed possible so unless the problem comes from the server itself I doubt that is the problem.


EDIT//
WinMTR to Brazil (BR)
http://pastebin.com/5ckgvMRw

WinMTR to US (Texas)
http://pastebin.com/EqpkSM8P

WinMTR to AU
http://pastebin.com/6sRaiJAG

I'm from Argentina so I connect to the BR server but I run some more WinMTR to see if there is a difference


EDIT//
Well today a was able to play fairly well at the beginning and in high specs, I enable multithreading but I dont know if that was the thing that make things better for me, it's strange how yesterday I wasn't able to play with low specs and today I was able to do it with high specs, I'm worried about the integrity of my hardware now, not the lack of it but the integrity of what I have, maybe my CPU and/or my GPU have some problems, sadly I cant replace them right now, but then the problems come back a little bit I was able to play but not as smothly like in the beginning... well it looks to be a hardware related problem... anyways not something I can fix right now, if anybody find that there is something else I can try please tell me.

Best regards!

your mtr to the br server looks fine.

some points:
- try to make the mtr while problems occur and let them run longer, (5 min min)
- run them against the ip address your game's logfile says you're just connected to (it's more accurate)
- you can always check the load on your gpu and cpu with the respective tools
- ggg confirmed that the game client speeding up is always a network related problem


the cpu temps issue:
if you enable multithreading in the game, your cpu shouldn't be able to switch to turbo (speeding up one core, lowering the speed on the others) anymore because more than one core is busy, i wouldn't change the turbo settings in the bios, ust enable the game's multithreading option.
and change the cooler ;)

I will try putting the mtr while playing I was going to do it but when I start playing today I was just fine.

In-game I always turn on the stats with F1 and sometimes the problem occur with a spike of latency but it also occur with a negative spike of FPS with steady latency, with I fire a skill or when I see new mobs, mostly when something gets triggered in game, it's like the fps drops from 50-60 to 0 for a short period of time, so maybe I have two problems that looks the same, spikes in latency and negative spikes in FPS... I dont have more problems because I dont have the time hehe.

yeah I will try to change the cooler but... I'm from Argentina, in Argentina hardware is double (without exageration) as expensive than in ebay or amazon, and it's at least 35% more expensive if I buy from there since my country doesn't want me to buy from internet and then I might have to pay even more in customs to get what I buy 2-3 months from the day I buy them... 1k USD for a GTX 1080 for example, it's crazy and our salaries are not double than in other countries with luck you have a salary that's like the minimum of other countries.

Thanks for the help I will run MTR while playing and then edit this post.

Best Regards!

EDIT//
I was looking for the logfile to see in witch address I was connecting in and I found a logfile named "Client" (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Path of Exile\logs) where I can see the conversations in chat but I also see a lot of this tipe of messages



Also a lot of this


And some others that are different


I guess the server is this



Can that be what's going on? the game is looking for files and the files are missing or corrupted?, those errors are all over that logfile.

Best Regards

the error with D3DERR_INVALIDCALL is a more serious one which probably needs deeper investigation. you would have to provide more detailed information about your hardware and drivers for devs to able to work on that.
a dxdiag report would give this info, just post it on pastebin.com and provide the link here.

errors when loading resources like *.ao may point to a inconsistent structure of your ressource file (content.ggpk). run the steam feature for an "integrity check" over the game files to verify it.

i think these errors are additional to your networking problems.

and you're right, the ip address to run the winMTR would have been 169.57.135.70 in your specific case. please grab the latest one from the logfile before you test

I have done the integrity check before and also reinstall windows, drivers and poe from scratch and didn't work but I'm doing it again.

Here is the dxdiag report
http://pastebin.com/jhfXQb2n

Best regards!

EDIT// The integrity check say there is no errors

So, I have "solved" the problem... Kinda

After looking for a lot of solutions I might have "solved" it... But I'm not so sure what the problem realy is and also I have another problem now but I must say... I prefer this problem.

So I made a WinMTR In-Game
http://pastebin.com/GhfSgq0V

But then I recorded this gameplay with "Play.tv" and uploaded to YouTube, hidden of course only work with the link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssDyETnt2EI (It's my first video on youtube)

Then when I was uploading the Video I started the game again because I thought that the Play client has some trouble and wasn't uploading anything, I enter the game and I have a LOT of Latency, from 200 to 1000 mainly 500-600 but... for my surprice my initial problem was gone... first of all I must say I thought that the problem was solved after I disabled Vsync in-game since I do that prior testing the game that time because of a thread that I saw on reddit saying that AMD have problems with PoE and R9 290X have a LOT of troubles with PoE so I thought that that's what solved my problem but since the Latency was so high I checked if that problem was because something was using more bandwidth than normal... and yes Play.tv client was using a lot of bandwidth so I went to my "Youtube Channel" (well... account) and I saw that my video was being uploaded so I wait until it finished I put the video hidden and then try the game againt... strangely my initial problem was back and Latency was a constant 45 again to the Sao Paulo (BR) server...
So it hit me... the game run smothly with high Latency... I mean... yeah laggy but not freezing like crazy like in the first video so... I tested, I connect to the second neardest server, Texas (US) 150ish Latency constant I test the game in that server and in town looks fine... I went to "Prison" and my problem was back, I saw the minimap and said "Sao Paulo (BR)" so I realize that PoE saves separated realm instances so I can have more than 1 instance of the same map in different realms... So I started a new Instance of "Prison" and tadaa my problem was gone but with a little bit of lag of course... I switched between instances (and realms at the same time) and my problem was back again like magic.
I put Vsync again, I deleted the --noasync in the parameters of the Steam client and it was the same... of course with Vsync Enabled I get up to a max of 60 FPS and without it can go up to 200FPS so clearly the problem wasn't my PC it was the connection all along but...

For Real... what's up with that? How can that be even possible? a low latency server is bringing me troubles and a server with 180 ms is working fine?... can anybody throw some light on this issue? is there a way to prevent this trouble from happening and still connect to the Sao Paulo realm or it is some kind of problem with the Sao Paulo realm?.

Either way here is another video that I make showing all this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giAPJG40LhA

I will be playing on the Texas Realm but I guess that something wierd is happening so I hope that last video can help somebody to figure the problem out and help me and/or GGG find a solution to this.

Best regards everybody

PD: Sorry for the "Bump" but I guess that in this case is somehow necesarry since what I found is realy strange and without making a new thread of course.

Those 1-2 seconds freeze are because there is some packet loss between your PC and the server.
I once analyzed that kind of lags in very detail using a network sniffer (wireshark) and analyzing the logfiles.
I was able to reproduce the issue and found out that the problem was on my side, because i also had from time to time a packt loss while pinging www.google.de for example.

The problem is, you can never guarantee 100% of packet arrivals in internet, so usually you need to have an application that is able to deal with some packet loss.

In PoE there are two options which affect how the game deals with network delays/packet losses:
- Predictive Mode
- Lockstep

You can change the setting in the options under:
UI -> Networking Mode -> Auto/Predictive/Lockstep

Lockstep was introduced a couple of months ago if i remember correct.

Now, you need to know the differences how it works:

- Predictive:
The client (Path of Exile game) will send it´s actions to the server and receiving back information from the server. If the server is not reachable, the game client will still react to your actions, e.g. moving/jumping. However, those packets might get lost on the way to the server does not know where you are actually in the game or which action you made.
In the end, this can lead to the so called "rubberbanding", where your character is being set back to a position you have been a few seconds ago. Another drawback is, it might happen that the server takes actions based on the last known location of your char. That means, if you are in a fight and stand on location X, while a big end boss tries to hit you, you run away to location Y. For you, it seems you evaded the attack. However, the server did not receive your new position Y, so once the packet loss is over you may find yourself being killed, even if you think you avoided the attacks.
- Lockstep:
To prevent the drawbacks of predictive mode, while the current "Real Game action" is different to the action the server knows about, predictive mode will always wait for client actions being "acknowledged" by the server. This way you keep the server and the client really in a constant and equal situation. However, you may already guess it, this can cause the game client to "freeze" or pause for a very short amount of time.

Unfortunately, this is truely a issue for ALL online games and packet losses or high delays can have soooo many different root causes - e.g. parallel usage of your internet connection by someone else , e.g. downloading large files, watching videos, etc...bad internet connection on your side, WLAN interferences cuased by other WLANs, issues of your serviceprovider, issues of the serviceprovider of GGG, issues on the path between your SP and the SP of GGG, as we recently had with Singapore GW due to a break in a fiber optic cable.

My suggestion is that you try to find out which mode (predictive/lockstep) fits best to your situation and personal flavour by switching between them and play a bit.
If you have "auto", this might answer your question why you can avoid those freezes when you have a high latency/ping....if i remember correctly, at high latency the game switches to predictive mode if you are using "auto mode".

Hope that explains the issue and helps getting rid of the "freezes"/hangs.

cheers

Now where're talking.

You're absolutely right the problem is the predictive and lockstep mode, I remember when this was first introduced but I dont realize that, that could be the problem since I never touched that setting I dont realize that I was configured as Auto, now it makes total sense, I changed to predictive and connected to the Sao Paulo server and worked perfectly well, right now I'm having problems with my conection to that server but that actually is a problem of my provider since is the lowest conection of the worst provider of my country, not my fault this *$#&% company make monopoly and forces people to get their awfull services.

But I also have this trouble with the other face, with the best provider at the highest possible conection and the problem was there, I dont remember if at the same point but it was there, maybe from Argentina is quite difficult to get a good enough connection to use lockstep againts the BR server, which is normal since both our countries doesn't have a good infraestructure.

Anyways, putting the settings to Predictive and connecting there will be the best I'm going to be able to do right now, but I think that maybe the Lockstep system might need some working, I understand how both systems work maybe we need something in the middle, something that is not as strict as Lockstep but either as permissive as Predictive.

So, thank you for your response it really answer the problem and as far as I know this isn't listed as a Common Technical Problem and it should be added there I guess.

Best Regards

EDIT//

Completely different, I put all the graphic settings to max and when finally my connection started working good at 50ms with predictive configured it work perfect for now.