A Compilation of Settings That Reduced Stutter and Freezing on My PC
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Update 2023/12/06: I upgraded my RAM to 32GB and that seems to have solved the problem for now
I've compiled a list of all the various settings I've changed on my PC, as well as other troubleshooting steps I've tried that have resulted in game performance improvements and a significant reduction in stutter and freezing. I hope that this will be helpful to some of you struggling with the performance of the game at the moment. Video of the problem: https://youtu.be/_b4zoUC6GiM Video of the gameplay after changing the settings listed below: https://youtu.be/wKEzvahEQd8 Video of the gameplay after upgrading to 32GB DDR4 3200 RAM: https://youtu.be/VeMOXda9pwY The RAM upgrade seems to have made the most difference. My system specifications: System Manufacturer: Acer System Model: Nitro N50-600 Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8400 CPU @ 2.80GHz/4.00GHz (6 CPUs) Memory: 8192MB => 32768MB RAM DirectX Version: DirectX 12 Card name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Display Memory: 8070 MB => 20358 MB Dedicated Memory: 4017 MB HDD: Intel Optane+932GBHDD Windows 11 Home 64-bit Changes I've made and the results: I cleared all my caches: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3421152 I disabled NVIDIA High Definition Audio and NVIDIA Virtual Audio Device (Wave Extensible) (WDM) in the Device Manager, and then just used the standard audio jack of my PC instead of the one in my monitor. I turned on Game Mode in Windows (just type "game mode" into your Start menu search bar). This setting makes Windows suspend everything it can to free up resources, for applications it recognizes as games. In the NVIDIA Control Panel, in the Adjust image settings with preview menu, I chose the option Let the 3D application decide. In the GeForce Experience application, under Open in-game overlay, I turned off Instant Replay In the GeForce Experience application, under Home/Games and Apps, I let it optimize the game for Maximum Performance. In the GeForce Experience application, under Settings > General > Image Scaling, I set it to render my Display's current resolution at 67% with 0% sharpening. Besides now technically rendering a much smaller frame and just upscaling it, this also results in a sort of computationally cheaper version of anti-aliasing. At this point, the game became playable for me. I'm still operating under the assumption that the main issue that I'm having is a lack of RAM, and I'll see if switching to 2 x 16 GB results in an improvement. I'll update this post when the RAM arrives and I've tested it. Below are the more esoteric things that I've tried that have also resulted in better performance, but I have since reverted those changes as they don't appear necessary in my particular case:
Spoiler
I went to production_Config.ini under C:\Users\username\Documents\My Games\Path of Exile and set ambient_sound_volume2=false. The more options I set to false, the less stutter I got.
I also tried the C-States edit: I created a custom Power Plan and then used: powercfg /list powercfg /setacvalueindex %New Power Scheme GUID% SUB_PROCESSOR IDLEDISABLE 1 powercfg /setdcvalueindex %New Power Scheme GUID% SUB_PROCESSOR IDLEDISABLE 1 Having looked into it some more, it is apparently not entirely unusual for certain applications to perform this action. PowerWriteACValueIndex and PowerWriteDCValueIndex are both functions from the powersetting.h header, so the game should be able to control this by itself. As far as I can tell, the consequences are: - higher energy consumption - more heat generated - higher fan usage (even higher energy consumption, noise, and possibly some ball bearings wear) So, this let me play, but my PC constantly sounded like it was about to take off into orbit. Last edited by GregoryAdams#7051 on Dec 6, 2023, 4:16:27 PM Last bumped on Dec 3, 2023, 8:18:02 AM
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