What's my bottleneck?

Hi. I've got a PC I built a few years ago. It's not bad but it could be better. I've seen some streams where PoE just plays buttery smooth especially in parties and I'm jealous and fiending for an upgrade.

Here are my specs:
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
AMD Phenom II x4 955 3.2 GHz Quadcore
8 GB 1333 Mhz DDR3 RAM
ASUS Motherboard
EVGA Nvidia GeForce 460 SE 1 GB GDDR5

It mostly plays fine solo (except when I get incinerate going) but it groups the fps drops a lot.
I have a SSD (can't remember exact model but I thin it was like 540 mb/s)
Fullscreen 1920x1080 with adaptive vsync on
High Textures (switching to med did nothing)
Low shadows
No Anti aliasing
No post processing
2x anisotropic filtering
FPS is 60 when in town but drops a lot in parties or when a lot of stuff is going on.
Ping is consistently ~60 (unless on different gateway)
--nosound didn't help
I switched my textures to "very low" the 4 setting in the config file and still same problems.

Here's some screens of docks party with my fps

http://postimg.org/image/4ztdjdf6r/
http://postimg.org/image/5nxmokoir/

I just tried at 1280x768 and the same stuff is happening in parties.

http://s24.postimg.org/7ef9xq7hf/Client_2013_09_19_11_39_02_63.png

Anyone know? Whats the best way to figure this out?

edit:

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+GTX+460+SE&id=123

=(

It might just be your ISP/internet connection. I play on Wi-Fi, so even at the best of times it can be a little spotty, even with my fairly beefy computer.

It's not a latency thing, I have good ping. I'm talking abot FPS drops. Even if you don't have good ping your fps won't drop you'll just desync like a mofo.

"

haplessG00N wrote:

It's not a latency thing, I have good ping. I'm talking abot FPS drops. Even if you don't have good ping your fps won't drop you'll just desync like a mofo.

Hmm, I don't know then, your rig looks pretty good. I get a constant 60fps on max settings when soloing, except when using Incinerate - stage 4 causes me to constantly spike from 60 to 30 and back - and my computer is slightly less powerful than yours.

Mine's my hard drive. What do you use? Everyone tells me I need to go solid state if I'm going to play these game.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

Mine's my hard drive. What do you use? Everyone tells me I need to go solid state if I'm going to play these game.

I have a good SSD. Hard drives mostly just affect loading times not actual FPS though.

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haplessG00N wrote:

"

Shagsbeard wrote:

Mine's my hard drive. What do you use? Everyone tells me I need to go solid state if I'm going to play these game.

I have a good SSD. Hard drives mostly just affect loading times not actual FPS though.

I don't suppose it's the monitor, but it's another possibility.

HDD is a typical bottle-neck you should look at. if you have one (and not an SSD), make sure you de-fragment your system partition, then the game file using this tool.
cleaning some junk (especially useless registry entries) also helps. this tool will help you with it.

next, run a benchmark on your GPU, and make sure it is consistent with the average benchmark for the exact same model.
if it isn't, update the driver and check to see if there is no overheating problem.
also, run a quick DxDiag and make sure everything is ok with your DirectX.

if all else fails, try editing the settings file located in /mydocuments/mygames/Path Of Exile and reduce the texture quality. here's how to do it.

Game runs fine for me until I run across a bunch of lightning spell users or I'm in lunaris 3 with all the blood. Same for you?

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johnKeys wrote:

if all else fails, try editing the settings file located in /mydocuments/mygames/Path Of Exile and reduce the texture quality. here's how to do it.

Low/very low texture quality looks horribad, though...