Constant lag spikes make it unplayable

"

derdeniska wrote:

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2076930

That was provided to tech support. And D3 doesn't lag, so yeah yeah my ISP...

Yup same here. no lag on D3 whatsoever f this game. I know it's free but holy Sh!t GGG...

"I don't lag in D3".... FailFish comment.

Your problem is the routing your ISP has towards the PoE server. At some point a gateway is acting badly and if you contact your ISP you can ask them to route the traffic differently (most half decent ISPs will fix this pretty fast). Have fixed this issue in several games previously by providing the winmtr info to ISP like that. There is nothing GGG can do to help you other than ask you to try a different server location. The stutter step you see in the clip you posted is caused by unstable/high ping in lockstep mode. It is not a graphics issue.

Having the same issue as the video you posted. Didn't play Bestiary league and did a return to Incursion. Was pushing my character in HC to level 99 and 46% and then the exactly same lagspike occured for me and I was sent to standard. Posting here now in order to hope for some solutions in the near future.

This lag is terrible. Combined with input lag that happens only in POE, this game quickly becomes unplayable. I know I do not have the best character or passive skill tree, but with this lag I have no chance against pack of enemies. Even with a 'perfectly' built character, the lag would still be a problem. I love this game, but this lag is a big penalty. Maybe it's time to move to a different game.

if someone found a fix for this ping spike please let me know thanks, my ping is always high too

Did the OP ever post his gaming rig specs and WinMTR numbers (I'm not scanning all 8 pages). Seeing the lag in the video and immediately assuming that since D3 doesn't lag that it must be GGG's server simulation at fault is a very oversimplification of what's going on/wrong. In truth it most definitely is GGGs coding that is to blame but the way in which the server PoE and client PoE communicate with each other is most definitely very sensitive to our Internet pipe but also has a lot to do with our gaming rig hardware. For most of my 5.75 years of playing PoE it was on a 3.3 GHz Intel i5 that only had a dual core with hyperthreading, 8 GB ram, a mechanical hard drive, and an AMD gpu. I can write off PoE:The Desync Years before we got Lockstep (deterministic lockstep is the official term). Once we had lockstep, I still was fraught with much lag and frustration, yet surprisingly D3 and other online games from first person shooters to war aviation sims all still played very smoothly. Here's the upgrades I did from then to now:

Note: All this is on Windows 7 Pro OS and the same ISP (Comcast) with a 50 ms ping to WDC realm
1. ugraded my cpu to an i7 with 4 cores + HT (8 threads) @ 3.5 GHz. (no reduction in lag)
2. Got a 500 GB Samsung 840 SSD for my C: drive. Much quicker loading but still no
    reduction in playing lag (some days are ok, many are very laggy).
3. Upgraded from a old AMD gpu with 2 GB ram to a R9 270 AMD gpu with 4 GB ram.
    Still no improvement in overall lagginess playing PoE.
4. Finally Christmas 2017 I was gifted a Nvidia 1060 AMP! video card with 6 GB ram.
    Finally, with the video card upgrade, most of my lag is gone. Not perfect, but
    significantly better then with an AMD gpu.

The proof that switching from AMD to a 1000 series Nvidia gpu solved my playing lag is the fact that I was never able to do breaches. On my AMD gpu breaches dropped my frame rate into single digits (5 or 6) and were totally unplayable. I was forced to skip Breach League entirely as a result of super low framerate. Now with the 1060 I can run any breach I come across in any map and get the loot pinata drops that everyone playing Breach League loved about it.

2nd effect of having the Nvidia gpu is that my day in, day out playing of PoE is quite enjoyable to not have to deal with much lag. I never experienced the lag that the OP video shows (that's horrendously laggy) but still I would routinely play with 45 to 70 ms latency and then frequently spiked up into the 200 to 500 latency range and even higher. With everything staying constant (my Internet link to WDC still goes from Comcast to HardLayer at the Miami NAP and latency to WDC is still averaging about 50 ms) and my only gaming rig change was the switch from AMD gpu to a faster Nvidia gpu, the lag times have gone way down and breaches and everything else plays well.

Just where the minimum gpu specs have to be to play PoE is up for further discussion. Maybe a top end AMD gpu will work well but someone else with one will need to speak to that. Also, what is the minimum Nvidia gpu that PoE will play nicely on is also for someone else to comment as this is the only Nvidia gpu I've ever had in my gaming rig.

To me it looks to be a combination of client side hardware in conjunction with the Internet routing of our PoE data packets from gaming rig to PoE realm and back. In many performance threads in the past players have stated that Nvidia gpu is superior to AMD gpu but until I actually was able to make the switch I wouldn't have believed it could be that much of a night and day difference. GGG has some serious graphics engine bottlenecks running on AMD gpu (GGG probably needs a version optimized for Vulcan driver) that manifest in making it look like a bad Internet link to the PoE realm. As the OP stated and I can corroborate, every other game from D3 on down the line plays well on my Internet and AMD gpu. It's only PoE that causes my R9 270 to choke and lag out and sometimes flatline.

GGG needs to do some serious game engine rework for better overall performance but some major work is needed to optimize better for AMD gpu. PoE hands down sucks on AMD gpu. If anyone has a rig with AMD gpu and PoE plays smoothly please post your game rig specs and WinMTR numbers. I'd love to see them.

poor OP. This is unbelievable. Hopefully they will fix it soon.

While there is plenty of issues where the ISPs can be the cause, the POE engine has been pretty bad since the beginning. Many games have the ability to adjust for less quality connections, to a point. I have a gig connections with great ping rates most of the time to the POE servers and a pretty efficient route to the North American server, which is only a few hundred miles from me. Yet, I still get lag storms from time to time. The engine is not great and when you combing the fact that everything has to register on the server before it happens on the client, it is a recipe for lag. This game is probably one of the worst I have seen in over a decade in the network stack department.

Meanwhile D3 is running normally. You see the irony?

The game has been contaminated with latency peaks since 3.3 and especially since the 3.3 Race.. For a few days now it has become completely unplayable. This is just a big shit! It does not work that way, it's no fun.

Pls fix it