Ok, don't know if it is exactly related, who knows with this darn patch, but since I had all the worst parts of that bloody gamebreaking update from a month ago, and now got a visible improvement, I am gonna share all I know.
Spoiler
First of all, that patch broke the game for me. Was running solid 60FPS most maps before it, after it it was rollercoaster frames from 30 to 50 anywhere, anytime.
At first the shaders thing did not work properly, they seem like they were reset at every game start, because I spent two hours Blood Aqueduct farming, and no matter what, the shader bar would go full for one minute everytime I went there after quitting the game. Also did all campaign areas and that did nothing. The game would also not show any skill or mobs at first appearence.
I tried everything known and shared in the forum. Deleted temps folders then moved the shader one on second SSD. No graphical option changed anything in the performance, except DX12 which made it worst. Also all dynamic options stopped working after that patch (and still don't work).
I then played ALL areas in the campaign to rebuild the shaders. Seem to work as the green bar did't show up anymore. Still absolutely terrible performance. No area was getting anything else than an accordeon of 30 to 55 fps. I gave up after wasting about 5-6 hours of shader building.
Then the new league started and it was even worst. Some areas would build shaders and the game went smooth until it was done, then back to horrendous yo-yo fps. When I stopped moving, the game went even even worst going from 20 to 40 fps with the most insane amount of spikes on the CPU.
I am now at Act 9 after 11 hours and you know what, the game is finally smooth. No more spikes. I still have all options to low or off (I'll try and move up those) and I regularly get a small spike when the game gets very intense.
So it seems that the game needs about 15-20 hours to build up the shaders, and then when it seems like no more shader bar appears, it still needs a lot of hours to smooth everything.
To resume, my game needed a termination of all temp folders, then creating/moving them on another SSD, lowering all options, and about 15-20 hours of gameplay to rebuild the shaders. On my Win 10 Pro, I7-4790K 4.0 GHz, GeForce GTX 1080 8.0 Go, 24 Go RAM.
So far so good. But good luck flaming your CPU for 20 hours of the most frustrating and un-enjoyable experience you'll ever have in this game.
Thanks GGG for never addressing this issue and never telling us the amount of work and patience needed to fix this problem that hundreds of players have.
Also I would not say fixed yet, need to map for days first to be sure it's stable.
I just picked up PoE again after a long hiatus and the game is performing really bad. I never had issues running this game in the past and the ironic thing is that I have a beefier video card now than I did the last time I played.
I keep crashing when trying to use vendors. Like I select an item in the trade window and then I get the "windows not responding" thing and have to close the game. It also takes a painful amount of time zoning to different areas (especially towns).
What is going on with this game? Is this new with this league or has this been going on a while? Came back to PoE after being so disappointed with D4 so it's pretty sucky to now get disappointment with PoE as well.
It's amazing how hard PoE wants me to not play it, at the moment for me it's impossible to play it with out using DX12 (Vulkan and Dx11 leave me in infinite loading screen), the only time I recall having this trouble was back in Delve when I didn't had a SSD and a 1050ti with 8gb ram.. now I have an nvme SSD, a 2060 and hadn't have problems since this league, not only that also have 150ms almost permanently with 10k spikes for like 5-10s and constant crashes during League Content, I can't play almost at all today, every time I play I run to a problem, endless loading, 20fps in town, 200ms in some areas but 50ms in others.. and they don't said anything so far so F me (all of us) I guess 🤷🏼♂️
Has GGG even acknowledged that they are aware of this problem or working on it or anything?
They tend to address it like 1 week later, and in a manner of "probably is your pc"
Knowing that PoE1 has almost no dev team makes me think that they don't care about this stuff and they will try to fix it 2yrs from now when PoE2 comes out
This is very disappointing. What a missed opportunity for GGG to convert a bunch of new players. I imagine after D4's dismal start there are a lot of players looking around and maybe finally giving PoE a chance...only to find this lackluster performance. What a pity.
