Forum Hardware Guru´s and Specialists Everywhere.

In this game, just like in many others, there are PC hardware gurus who give tips to others, but don’t even realize how badly the game actually runs on their own systems.

They’re so incredibly in love with their game that they don’t notice the stuttering, slow loading times, or the freezes. You could call it being blind with love.

Now, it wouldn’t be so bad for those who do notice, for example, that Path of Exile 2 is a complete programming disaster, and who speak up in the forums asking for help.

Immediately, one of those so-called top hardware gurus shows up and gives the usual advice: update your drivers, optimize your BIOS, tweak Windows, or even REINSTALL WINDOWS-for a dumb game that’s just badly made.

It’s always the same people.

As I said, those who are in love with a game are so blinded by their passion and dedication that they don’t realize how badly it actually runs for them.
They give out super optimization tips that, unfortunately, don’t help anyone-because the game itself is just poorly optimized.

I’ve been observing these “super gurus” since around 1998, back in the Everquest days. Supposedly, everything always runs perfectly for them, and for decades now they’ve been giving out the same useless tips that never actually help anyone.

The game is just very poorly optimized. Mostly down to CPU so i would assume there are too many systems and calculations interacting with each other when a lot is going on on the screen. But also the vfx seem to cause a lot of issues. Sometimes the game comes to crawl in hideout just from some other players showcasing their fancy cosmetics. Definetely some mode to drastically reduce vfx cost would be a good idea.

That said things seem to get a bit better. After latest patch i was able to switch back to Directx (was unusable in initial 0.2 release due to nonstop fps drops) from Vulkan and game runs smoother now for me while even looking slightly better. Still not great tho and nowhere near as buttery smooth as D4.

I've been observing people who've been observing people since 1998... since 1998. Weird. The shadow people go away when you turn the shadow settings all the way down.

You gonna do what you gonna do to make sure this unopimized game works fine because it does run well (not great, that's for later) with proper hardware and setup. Also there's things like using Windows 11 that's not recommended, so you'll see folks recommending to return to Windows 10 just so they can play PoE2 without crashes and other issues. It's totally justified most of the time...game runs like crap so min/maxing is the only solution.