Old performance issue still haunts me

This seems mainly due to effects playing on rare and champion monsters. Notable offenders are:

- The various types of sailor ghosts
- Water elementals
- Any rare or champion monster
- Anything that has been hit by poison arrow
- Combat in close proximity to lights of the type in alira's camp. (the church dungeon torches don't seem to cause any problems)

Framerate is frequently reduced to a slideshow. I've been told in the past that this is due to "shader generation", and that it will only happen once for each combination of effects. This is false. Perhaps it is true for each individual session, but as soon as you exit the client, you're back to square one.

I've also been told that it is due to disk loads, but I'm not buying that explanation. I can run open world games like oblivion and GTA that have to constantly stream large amounts of data from disk, and while there might be the occasional slight hitch here and there, it's nothing like what happens when I shoot a poison arrow at a rare monster.

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Malice wrote:

This seems mainly due to effects playing on rare and champion monsters. Notable offenders are:

- The various types of sailor ghosts
- Water elementals
- Any rare or champion monster
- Anything that has been hit by poison arrow
- Combat in close proximity to lights of the type in alira's camp. (the church dungeon torches don't seem to cause any problems)

I forgot to mention a couple:
- Raising a spectre
- Elemental skeletons


The elemental skeletons (the newer melee ones) are probably the worst offenders of all. I don't even have to hit them with anything, just mouse over them for a nice slideshow.
It's so bad it's like the old situation with the epic 10-sec lag in the chamber of sins boss room from many patches ago.

It has pretty much always happened, there was a certain patch long ago before the start of the beta (can't remember which one exactly), when I first noticed it happening, mainly with rare monsters.
There are cases where it has come and gone, like the aforementioned chamber of sins boss room.

There was another case of this sort of thing: fireball with multiple projectiles. I haven't played a character doing that for a while, but last time I did, the longer I went without restarting the client, the worse performance got while using this spell. Everything would be fine to begin with, but after 2-3 areas, casting the fireball was game over, whether there were enemies around or not. I could stand there and cast it for a while, until things smoothed out, but then as soon as a rare monster came along it would be slideshow time again. It was better to just restart the client.

I haven't changed drivers in this time. I don't think there will have been any driver updates relevant to my card.
When I first got the card I tried a number of different drivers, but found that the latest driver from the manufacturer worked better than newer ones from AMD.

System specs:
ASUS A8V deluxe mainboard
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ 2.2Ghz (single core!)
2GB DDR400
Powercolor Radeon HD4670 AGP


I'm quite happy to accept that the problem lies in my CPU being too old and crap, or the GPU being bandwidth starved or something, if that is indeed the case.
Turning all the graphics options to lowest doesn't seem to have any effect.

If you have any specific tests or other information gathering I'd be happy to do it.

I think there is really a problem with poison arrow.

On my PC (specs see below) PoE becomes very laggy after shooting poison arrow with LMP. I hardly doubt that it is because of my hardware.

Additionaly if there is a champion/rare mob the other players can't see anything through the "poison cloud". ;-)

Specs:
Intel Xeon 5690 (6x 3.46GHz)
ASUS Rampage II Extreme (1366 socket)
Mushkin 12GB DDR3 Ram
Zotac Geforce GTX 580
Kingston HyperX SSD
Windows 8
Latest stable nvidia driver.
All other drivers up-to-date.

Nice to see I'm the only person in the world who plays this game with 2GB RAM.

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DavosTheOnionKnight wrote:

Nice to see I'm the only person in the world who plays this game with 2GB RAM.

I play with 2GB of Ram, it's the most painful thing ever, if I party with over 2 more people I get constant 5 - 10 fps, and it actually drops to 1 - 2 fps with summoners etc.

Really fun