Hideout - 200 FPS. Breaches - Down to 1-5 FPS. Why?

Hey there everyone. First I want to say how much I enjoy playing this game. It has increadible potential to be the best game ever made, but it still needs some working on in several directions.

One of which - The strange FPS issues.

Here I'd like to say first that it's not an issue with my PC. I run all new-age games at max graphics with +60 FPS stable.

Since the start of Breach league I decided to lower all my setings, disable everything and edit the .ini file with the "=no_shadows" thing, it increased the performance greatly (to between 150-200 FPS while in hideout).

The problem - Breaches - What the hell?
From all my leveling deaths from 1 to 94 (12), 10 of them are from Breaches, and 2 me being noob with the map terain).

When there are more monsters in Breaches, my FPS drops to ..like.. Screenshots per second.. not even FPS.. For 2-3 seconds everything Freezes and I spam HP flask and whirling blades to move around (because you know, movement is life), but it doesn't always work..

I've died several times on levels +92 at 80-90% exp and we all know how demotivating this is, to die not because you lack skills, but weird FPS issues. It's just frustrating.

I know others have complained about this, so why are there no results? Why are you not fixing what your customers complain about? Why are you not trying to satisfy your clients in every way they ask..?

Suggestion: Include a few settings, that remove unnecessary monsters effects, glows, explosion effects etc, because when there are 30 monsters and they all die simultaneously, even NASA computers will struggle.

Please, do not neglect these kind of requests by your customers (us) and fix what needs fixing, because sincerely - I have never enjoyed playing a game like I enjoy playing Path of Exile and I do not wish to play anything else anymore.

Thank you in advance!

P.S I'd also like to add, that I had no FPS issues at MAX settings in the end of Essence league. Game ran smoothly at 200 FPS without lag spikes to 5 FPS, so please track from the patches since then to see what went wrong.

Please No Cancer comments.

It's unlikely this will get any real kind of response. Keep in mind that your feedback can only be as worthwhile as it is specific, and you didn't give any specifics for GGG to even try to work with.

I think I said that the problem is mostly in Breaches or where there are large groups of monsters. They all have a thousand effects and explosions, glows and whatever.
We need a setting that disables the unnecessary details.

Nah, we need even more obscene effects that kill framerate but make the game slightly better looking for people on the highest end possible machines.

That's all GGG is going to give us. No options menu, that would be *crazy*.

What system do you have spec wise. CPU, HDD, RAM, GPU?

When i upgraded i took note for this game. I still use the DX9 client. but basically the game eats up more CPU and data processing bandwidth then i would say GFX processing.

When i built my new PC I went from ddr2-800 (6.4 GB/s) to DDR4-3200 (25.6 GB/s). I went from a SATA 3.0 GB/s HDD to a PCIE 3.0 X4 Solid state drive. While keeping the Same Geforce GTX 760 card.

In short, you need a SSD to not lag in this game. But also a high clocked Core I7 processor. A breach probably has a shit ton of draw calls too when spawning minions. Is it mob density or just the GFX effects?

It is hard to determine if you are GPU bottle necked or CPU bottle necked. Both can occur depending on what engine you run.

The game runs much slower than it could for many of us. Keep in mind that GGG does of course try to tackle the performance, however, sometimes they add more new unoptimized shiny stuff to "compensate" for any performance improvement they manage to achieve. Just saying.

However, the exact cause can differ from machine to machine.

There are few things that you can try.

1, turn off BOTH global chats. Super crazy thing, but for some reason, on my machine, having a chat going kills FPS. I suspect there is some huge netcode problem underneath. What I do : I find myself "a quiet room" (/trade 9999 /global 9999 - and I hope those remain quiet even after today :)), because yes, having the channel subscribed and not shown is enough to kill performance for me. This one is so weird it slowly defeats my belief in PoE ever being optimized in the end.

2, try the difference between fullscreen and windowed fullscreen. In my case, windowed fullscreen is for some reason much better

3, run from RAMDISK if you can. Because the .ggpk essentially doubled its size now (! maybe another hint on the performance situation), you more or less need 32GB RAM to do this with no sweat. But it helps.

4, do not party. The most heart breaking truth. Party play just kills FPS, depending on the skills involved. In fact, all of my ingame friends I used to map with quit the game, because party play was just hideously choppy in their eyes. So now I play solo.

Thank you all for the helpful comments. I will do everything you said.

Also, about the party - I have a friend who plays Copspri Discharge - I can't party with him. Instant death... I see nothing, just 1 FPS while he's killing stuff and that's that.. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Wow.. I just set my texture quality from the ini file to 10 - STILL, when I'm in breach - 5 FPS... What the damn hell?!

"

RawrrFearMe wrote:

Wow.. I just set my texture quality from the ini file to 10 - STILL, when I'm in breach - 5 FPS... What the damn hell?!

It's because it is not related to texture quality at all...

There are mainly 2 things that cause severe frame-lag in POE, and both are related to the same thing:

1.) Skills causing multiple skill effects to go off at once, say Herald of Ice explosions covering the screen

2.) Skills causing multiple recalculations that in turn cause multiple recalculations, say Herald of Ice explosions chaining into other HoI explosions, or say chaos explosions from the Obliteration wand, or SrS moving in or out of auras. This causes massive recalculations on the servers, and they just can't keep up, and you lag.

There are other things too, but Breaches are clearly causing both of these issues with the right skills...