Should I upgrade to new PC or wait for a performance fix?

Hello,

I have never had fps issues with games until POE2. Which is surprising because the game shouldn't be so intensive. Do you think I should upgrade or wait until it gets pathched?

I mostly run over 100fps, however in intense battles and effects it goes to 30-40, I have tried lowering everything, but still no improvement.

I have 4070 laptop with i9 -13900 and 32gb ram. 4k is barely 60fps.

Other games run smoothly 1440p, even heavy 3d shooters.

Actually it has always been the other way round for me. I buy the computer so I can play the specific game that I want to. In this case I would love to play POE2 long term, hence I'd like it to run smoothly. The computer is just a tool.

Having serious issues with microstutter, hitching, and unstable FPS. It looks like they're spotloading a lot of stuff (PoE2 is on an external HDD because it's very large, which means I get to see all of the areas where the developers went "nah, the drive should be fast enough for this not to be an issue"), which is not an excellent idea, but makes sense in an alpha. There's also at least a few things in the render code that could use a tinkering or two - frame time should probably not spike by 250% for multiple seconds because the boss used a specific attack. I suspect some shaders are probably at fault, which are easy to fix compared to most other issues with render time.

Most of the time, on (near) max settings my frame time is 6-8ms, but some areas and fights push it above 30ms. One fight kept me below 20 fps for no discernible reason every time the boss did a specific move (have since forgotten which one), with little visual effect.

There also seems to be an issue where network problems cause framerate problems, which is a touch more concerning than the others.

TLDR, It's an alpha, they have some work to do on the graphics engine. I'd wait for a patch instead of upgrading for now.

It is also worth noting the game is actually a pretty high-def 3D game. I would say my expected performance load is closer to something like an open space in Destiny than something like CoD - there's hardly any occlusion, so there's a lot on screen at once, all the time, and none of the geometry is simple flat surfaces.

As development progresses further and they work on making the loading, shaders, etc more performant and better paced, etc, I'd expect performance to improve significantly. Until then, I'd bump down to 1080p, and plug the laptop into power and an ethernet cable if you can.

RE: buying a computer for the game, I bought my GPU and CPU so I could play Space Engineers, Rimworld, Stellaris, and Factorio at reasonable speeds with the kind of mods I put into them.

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akovachev#5666 wrote:

Do you think I should upgrade or wait until it gets pathched?

If "upgrade" means new laptop - i am not sure will it help, mostly because laptops are having mobile graphics and CPUs, which are power-limited comparing to PC.

You could try to monitor performance of the game - just to find what exatly is bottleneck in your case.

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akovachev#5666 wrote:

I have 4070 laptop with i9 -13900 and 32gb ram. 4k is barely 60fps.

Other games run smoothly 1440p, even heavy 3d shooters.

i9 Raptor Lake is 2 years old CPU, i run the game on a 5 years old AMD CPU on a 2K (QHD) Resolution - frames depend on map and what is going on, but generally it all ok, i wouldn't run 4k if i were you unless that's native for your laptop monitor..

laptops IMHO are hard to maintain - i did a thorough cleaning and thermal paste re-apply and it helped with ~15C on the CPU and ~5C on the GPU. If you can spare the time - go clean your laptop with some professionals, good for the machine anyway - i wouldn't buy a new one, the one you have if fairly new but there are so many parameters in the equation.... the game will be optimized, GGG are a bright example for how software (not just a game) should be maintained and their CI/CD cycle is just remarkable - no matter what the uneducated comments say (i'm with ~17 years carrier in software development - i've earned my right to be opinionated on forums :D )

Good luck!

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akovachev#5666 wrote:

Do you think I should upgrade or wait until it gets pathched?

Upgrade hardware for Path of Exile 2?
Are you crazy?

See what you have compared to the recommended requirements.
With your hardware PoE 2 should "fly" on your computer.

My hardware is also better then recommended but I have same issues you have.

They MUST improve performance.

Thanks everyone, all great comments! I will likely hold my horses.

And yeah, upgrading means new laptop or tower.

The game is indeed flying most of the time (80%).

I'm mostly running 1440p on external monitor (sometimes on 4k tv). Bumping down 1080p deals with mostly with the issues, but doesn't look very nice.

I'm running the game on a i5-12600KF 3.7GHz with an RX 6800XT at 4K native resolution, everything on high.

There are occasional frame drops, but mostly when I open a breach or something nasty like that.

I don't think buying a new laptop will help you in that case.

It's weird how poe2 is actually optimized.
I have an old ryzen 5 1600, 16 gb ram and 5700xt, installed it on nvme2 drive.
No crashes, no frame drops, latest windows version.
Everything is on high, fps capped to 60.