PoE2 horrible, really HORRIBLE performance

Hi there, i know its only "EA" but that performance now is much worse than on release i think.
Now sometimes is unplayable while FPS drops almost to zero. Delirium fog drops FPS down flat by 40%, spells effects kill what remains. Why is that?
What im doin wrong? Ive tried almost everything.

Lowest possible settings (and ugly as 90s games)
Intel Core Ultra 5 245KF 4.2Ghz
RTX 4070ti
32BG RAM 7000MT/s
64bit Win11Pro 24H2
Vulkan
3440*1440
Nvidia Driver 581.29 (actual)
3D settings shader 100GB
3D settings max performance
System settings HW acceleration ON
Bios driver actual

Performance video here
https://youtu.be/e8IIHftNFtg

I saw drops to 25 FPS, at 1:30 (somewhere around) is drop to 15 FPS!

You shouldn't be on max performance for this game. There are far too many calculations going on in this game for most people to handle 1440p or max performance.

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Rakie1337#5746 wrote:

You shouldn't be on max performance for this game.

That's entirely irrelevant to the issue - which the screenshot demonstrate - "shader compilation".

To the OP:
the only way to mitigate it to pause the game and way for it to complete on the fly shader compilation. The impl. is pretty disastrous.

You can see both the shader bar and the cpu being busy - doing the compilation.


Side note - the EA/beta/whatever is entirely irrelevant as well. Unless there is some drastic change how the handle the issue, the lag spikes lasting for dozen of seconds are there to stay. The FPS is one thing the frame pacing would be even worse.

Damn, 160 ms on the CPU is very high.
Looking at the performance profile it seems like your CPU is throttling given the constant 100% load to generate shaders.
By the way, PoE2 is the first game which made me look into undervolting\cutting frequencies of my CPU to the point where it can be at 100% load (turbo on) and to not throttle. I have a pretty old laptop though, your PC is much, much better.
PoE2 right now is basically a stress test of your system.
Now, back to your issue.
Your problem may be related to the following reasons: cache generation\CPU throttling\hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling. I'm not a tech expert at all, but it seems like your CPU is doing what GPU supposed to do. If I'm correct here, your CPU is getting overwhelmed by the amount of work it has to perform (generating shaders + other stuff) and starts to throttle. By the way, my graph looked pretty much the same without the hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling, so maybe you should turn it on, if it is disabled.
Upd: sorry, completely missed the fact you have turned it on. Well, I'm not sure then.

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grynnder#7112 wrote:

If I'm correct here, your CPU is getting overwhelmed by the amount of work it has to perform (generating shaders + other stuff)

Shaders are programs (for the GPU), the code of the programs is compiled by the CPU, however. To put it simply - shader compilation on the fly would always result in some slutter. The engine should precompile all the shaders on entering the portal, or the least should have such an option.

The 100GB of shader cache should be plenty.

On a 2nd thought I don't know how well PoE2/win11 deal with the compilation scheduling wise, i.e. if it uses the E cores (that suck).
To the OP: you may wish to set affinity of PoE2 (and steam/epic launcher) to the performance cores only.

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grynnder#7112 wrote:

PoE2 right now is basically a stress test of your system.

PoE is exceptionally far from being a stress test. If you wish to actually stress test your laptop, I'd recommend running y-cruncher or blender (prime95, of course as well)

Last time I logged I saw similar kind of shader spikes, even though it seemed to even out at some point. But it's pretty clear that there's something seriously wrong with the shader code. Almost looks like it discards shaders and few seconds later decides oops i need that, and compiles it again. That sounds like a very weird bug.

Honestly, I don't believe performance stuff people post anymore.

I run Debian Linux (newest possible kernel (testing branch)) with an AMD 5700X3D, Nvidia 3070 (v.550 drivers), and 32GB DDR4 Ram and have performance problems rarely, except running burning ground + delirium or equivalent maps on a 4k screen (NIS 1080p upscaler). How is that?

My GPU never overheats. My CPU never overheats. I can run whatever synthetic benchmark I like and nothing ever happens. Something is off here. I don't claim to know everything, but something is off.

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yetyzyma#6701 wrote:

Hi there, i know its only "EA" but that performance now is much worse than on release i think.

No excuses. Lemme make that clear. Performance needs work regardless of EA. That said:

Your arrow lake cpu is just a revision on meteor lake. It's also near the bottom of the barrel in terms of CPU's released that year.

Less cores, less threads than an i7 or i9. It is a mobile CPU.

You did the important settings, but your resolution is too high. 1920x1080. This is the standard. All games use shenannigans to pretend they do well above that. They don't.

If you fix the CPU issue, (you wont), then you need to look at reBar (nVidia) or CAM (AsRock mobos). The PCIe bus was simply not designed to push the amount of data back and forth that modern GPU's need.

If that don't work, welcome to the club. They never got performance right in PoE 1, they sure as shit ain't gonna start now.

Had issues with shaders also. Micro freezing, long load times etc. The only thing that helped me was add the shaders folder to windows defender exclusions. As for general FPS, nothing you can do really. I have a 3060Ti, play on 1080p and dlss quality. most of the time fps is 50-60, but with large groups or abyss it drops to ~30.

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comnom#5629 wrote:

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yetyzyma#6701 wrote:

Hi there, i know its only "EA" but that performance now is much worse than on release i think.

No excuses. Lemme make that clear. Performance needs work regardless of EA. That said:

Your arrow lake cpu is just a revision on meteor lake. It's also near the bottom of the barrel in terms of CPU's released that year.

Less cores, less threads than an i7 or i9. It is a mobile CPU.

You did the important settings, but your resolution is too high. 1920x1080. This is the standard. All games use shenannigans to pretend they do well above that. They don't.

If you fix the CPU issue, (you wont), then you need to look at reBar (nVidia) or CAM (AsRock mobos). The PCIe bus was simply not designed to push the amount of data back and forth that modern GPU's need.

If that don't work, welcome to the club. They never got performance right in PoE 1, they sure as shit ain't gonna start now.

Yes well, maybe they should.
In my experience (and for many others as well) performance/optimisation is the n°1 problem in the game right now.

It is absolutely atrocious, worse than it has ever been in poe 1 or 2. Actually I think I've never played a game that put such a strain on your system. It's just not acceptable.
At the moment I'd like to play more of the endgame but I'll stop and reroll a character for the campain then be done with 0.3.
I won't bother with 0.4 if there's no improvement on performance, the game's content is very good, but the abysmal performance makes playing it a nightmare.

By the way, this could probably be alleviated by toning down some of the visual effects, which are also making the game difficult or impossible to read at times.
I really don't need that many explosions, particles and lightings, or even the fog effects on delirious maps.
It makes the game more difficult to read, hurst your eyes after long exposure, in some cases makes it look ugly and also kills fps.
It sure is cool the first few times around, but maybe let's look into some option settings to tone down these effects or straight up disable ok ggg ?