Low-end PC configuration

Hello and happy new year to GGG staff and forum members.

My request/question is about low end pc configuration. As the game progresses league after league, it becomes harder and harder for my pc to handle the game mechanics(eg delirium or betrayal intervention) and graphics decently. In fact at the moments it barely does, so i die to crashes due to hardware too often, i even quit hardcore for the last 2 years for that reason.

I really play the game as you can see since closed (or open?) beta, i evolved as the game did, and i remember how much i enjoyed the game on this rig at older leagues. While all the graphic improvements are welcome and i can understand that people who are passionate gamers that invest into their PCs deserve cool visuals, there are many people like me who are not that passionate or prioritize different things. For example i play PoE, 1-2 other games on steam like dota, and the rest are old school games like Baldur's gate 2, icewind dale and such. I would really like an overhaul sometime, so that PoE can run smoothly on my low end pc, even if the majority of cool effects are disabled, but without the game pixelizing like it does now. I am sure that there are more people like me who cannot afford or do not want to invest into a high end pc, and if they had to choose they would definitely choose quality over graphics.

Thank you in advance, sincerely, because after all these years you have proven that you value the community deeply, so i expect my request to be looked into, for the satisfaction of all the players who are forced to play on low end pcs for whatever reason.

P.S.: 3.13 expansion looks SICK !!! See you in game

I feel your pain here when it comes to running low-end pc's/laptop with the current game. I had been using an old Lenovo Laptop I purchased off a friends' GF for $50 about 3 1/2-4yrs. ago, and although it wasn't the best rig in the world (And really not set-up for high-end gaming tbh), it was for the most part able to handle most of the situations that had to deal with playing Diablo 3 either solo or even as a Monk Support in a full party (with noticeably more lag from more mob density ofc), pushing high Greater Rifts, and enjoying the climb on the 2-4 person party/Solo Crusader/DH Leaderboards. However, after that disgraceful display at Blizzcon with the Diablo:Immortal announcement, I uninstalled all Blizzard games/platforms and came to Path of Exile towards the very end of Delve League.

Continuing to run my Acer Lenovo 2.0 GHz processor AMD HD8400 with 4 cores and only 4GB RAM wasn't really cutting it, so I added another 4 GB RAM to it while making sure I stay on top of all optimizations possible on an almost daily basis to ensure that once I started gaming that my rig would have enough juice to run the content. Upon playing PoE initially (***And btw I do miss the old
Lioneye's Watch music in town***Cough Cough*** so at least add it to our HO music player? o.o), and all the way up towards the end of synthesis, I had some hiccups here and there but nothing really game-breaking when it came to lag/freezes/sudden dc's.

It was when Betrayel had started, where things began spawning-in more on an already cluttered screen of mobs that I realized more strain was being put on my processor to be able to handle these new league mechanics. I wasn't the only one back then having issues, and GGG did what they could to improve overall game performance with subsequent patches. These did help quite a bit, and for the most part, I was left with lag issues only during the intervention encounters (not so much in research where I noticed a lot more players having difficulty).

Anyhow, I continued doing what I could to tweak my poor old rig on the software end, and this worked for me on a very very small budget at the time with 0 hardware upgrades, although it became more and more apparent/frustrating to the point that I had to choose to skip content to progress my character, which is what happened during Delerium League. I just didn't run the content because for me, it was guaranteed experience loss due to incredible freeze/lag.

Up until 4 months ago, I realized enough was enough and made a change. I had made a plan 6 months prior to that to begin saving a little bit of $ from each and every paycheck, and just stash it away on a bi-weekly basis. At the end of this 6-month period, and deferring to waste the $ on non-essential things, I was able to purchase a whole new Gaming Laptop rig with an SSD, 16GB RAM, 16 Logical Cores, 2.6GHz Processor with AMD Ryzen 7, and Nvidia RTX 2060 Super.

I was literally blown away at the difference in quality and performance, and have 0 regrets whatsoever in sacrificing a bit of periodic instant-gratifications while keeping my eye on the prize that was to be the gaming system that would alleviate my gaming despair.

I do wish you well, and I do hope GGG does something more with Vulkan and maybe improve from the beta version it is still in now so these sudden/random dc's that happen while using it occur less often (Did not have any issues with dc's prior to Heist launching, while running DirectX12 temporarily, making some adjustments in background programs list while turning some off completing, then switching back). I Still do have the occasional/sudden dc that crashes me straight to the desktop screen but nowhere near the rate that it was before after tweaking a few things there and in my paging file to allow for Windows to manage it instead of setting it to max RAM.