PC - Found something to help with constant Shader downloading

Finally stumbled up on this reddit post from when they first launched the "performance patch".

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/15icji4/how_i_solved_my_performance_issues_on_an_old/

I did not have excessive loading times. My issue was simply playing at a slideshow for the entirety of the league except during off times when the servers had no bandwith, but I was also on Predictive during then to decouple myself from Lockstep waiting on the Shader download Latency to sort itself. With the graphs up, my CPU was always maxed, Latency constantly spiked, and Shaders were constantly zero to 100. Even when I settled on Legion dunes running the same content over and over, it was slightly better (cache size limit issue?), but still had issues.

I followed the steps and as of now I'm back on [Lockstep, Multi-threading, and Dx12, 1920x1080 fullscreen windowed] with no issues besides the expected big Shader draw (expected from the steps) as they recompile. After the shader draw, flawless CPU and latency running Blood Aqueducts 5 times, performing better after each run.

Out of frustration I did all of the steps in one go but reviewing them, the main culprit was probably a combo of the PoE Shaders, Nvidia Shaders, and NVidia's Shader Cache size. I had previously followed instructions (same ones this guide has) to delete PoE's shaders to recompile them, but had the same issues with them never actually being cached. I can only assume after having done all the steps (now I will go back and undo the fps specific limitations) that it was my core issue. Something is probably wonky w/ NVidia's / PoE's dynamic shader cache allocation. If you do go through and update your Shader Cache size, I still recommend deleting all current shaders to let them all recompile freely within that range. I set mine to 100gb (the highest under unlimited, scared of "memory leaks" if these can even do that).

Again, only speculation as I ran through all the steps before testing, but that seemed to be my culprit for now.

I'll come back and edit this if the issue arises again, for now going to try and undo the specific FPS limiters and run BA a few more times as I go.

/e Uncapped my fps and restored the similar settings in NVidia. I believe the only left changes were the max power and Shader Cache size ones. So far, I've finished A9, A10, Merc Lab, and ran a few Legion Dunes on my other char. After the shader compiles, the game is no longer a slideshow. The difference now is the CPU is moving around as expected, Latency is stable, and Shader when in use is a solid green bar. Neither Latency nor Shader are spiking every step my character takes.

I'm going to continue to lean on the idea that PoE is not able to handle a dynamic "Shader Cache" size. Whether that's strictly NVidia not letting them or some PoE2 engine to PoE1 conversion spaghetti code that's not letting it happen, idk.

You will find going forward the the split of POE1 and POE2 will harm POE1 way more in terms of overall performance.

They don't want two games with somewhat different code running on the servers they hire out around the world. As costs will go through the roof. So they are trying to force POE2 coding into POE1. Which sadly isn't working out and it seems it will never work out.