Jittery: PoE sets own Windows process priority from "High" back to "Normal" upon PoE focus

Hello community,

I am having jittery gameplay due to CPU spiking to 50-60 ms about twice per second, yielding a chainsaw graph for CPU. GPU is stable around 12 ms. If I move around, I lose all smoothness, as the view will jump constantly instead of smoothly rolling through. In general, the sensation is of being disconnected from the gameplay, lack of real time almost.

I noticed that when I use a second screen to keep a resources monitor open, if I set PoE (PathOfExileSteam.exe) to "Above Normal" or "High" or even "Realtime" priority, it will reset iself to "Normal" when I click back on PoE to actually play. Then it will reset itself to whatever I used (let's say "High" if I focus back to Windows Explorer), and so on. This means that other processes and services will constantly jump ahead of PoE for resources during gameplay, especially CPU, which seems the issue. That's something that would go unnoticed if you don't check on a second screen, since when you Alt+Tab the priority goes back to "High" but that's not what you're getting during gameplay.

I tried Process Lasso for stronger control, to no avail most of the times. Are there any ways I can fix the issue? I think if I can get PoE to run with High priority, things should be much better. My desktop PC (i5 10400, GeForce RTX 3060, 16 GB) should be more than enough to run smoothly in non-combat-heavy conditions. Temperatures are fine.

Any advice is welcome. Thanks in advance!

I highly doubt changing the process priority will help.
Do you use an fps limit or vsync in game ?

Also, for me, i get smoother fps if i set an fps limit in the NVIDIA driver (on top of vsync or fps limit in POE).

I have a ryzen 2600 and GTX 1080.

Changing the Process Priority for ANY application, game or not, is seriously not required, nor does it actually DO Anything good. Ever.

"mute when background" causes issues for me

problem goes away after changing zones or not using that conditional mute option