My boys (and girls LOL girls playing video games):
After ~2 weeks of testing, these are the only things that make the game playable for me right now.
1) Shader disk cache
__GL_SHADER_DISK_CACHE_SIZE=10737418240
(Set in the launcher. You can increase it further, but in my experience, it doesn’t change much.)
2) Renderer workaround
DX11: unusable (severely degraded performance).
Vulkan: crashes with a fatal error (already widely reported).
DX12: the only viable option.
The problem is VRAM management.
When VRAM reaches a critical state, textures degrade heavily (washed out, missing icons/assets), even though FPS remains stable.
The only way I’ve found to “flush” VRAM without restarting the game is:
Switch DX12 → Vulkan
Immediately switch Vulkan → DX12
This forces the engine to release VRAM, bringing usage back to ~1.3–1.4 GB.
After that, the game runs fine again until the next map or until VRAM fills up once more.
This is obviously a terrible workaround, but it’s the only thing that works for me.
From what I can tell, this league introduced much more aggressive VRAM retention (shaders/resources not being released properly). On low-VRAM GPUs, this makes the game borderline unplayable.
I’ve been playing Path of Exile for ~6 years, and this is honestly the first time I can say:
"I want to play my favourite game, but the engine won’t let me."
Ps: This screenshot should tell GGG something 30k shaders created in a pc that is barely playing the game...
