Game breaking: Pcie 8x and 16x

Hi GGG! This league i started having this issue where when i'm using dx12 or vulkan my fps gets "capped" at 70 with 14ms, and when i swap to dx11 it goes back to normal which is 144 fps and 7ms.

After a long research, i found out that what's causing the issue is my motherboard that's limiting my pcie to 3.0 and the game now is requiring 4.0. Sadly it doesn' give me the option to swap from 3.0 to 4.0 on bios.

After reading through a lot of feedback, i believe this issue came with the engine patch back in 3.21 but surprisingly the issue only started to occur for me this league.

Another weird ocurrence is that somedays dx12 and vulkan will work normally! Then the next day, or a few days later, the issue comes back.

This is a problem that i've been having exclusively on Path of Exile. Other games like Black Desert Online, WoW, Guild Wars 2, Cyberpunk etc have no issues running on 3.0.

Also i would have no issues swapping back to dx11 but sadly the performance is unbearable leaving me no options.

My fps is locked at 143 and this is what it looks like on login screen:



These are my game settings after swapping a lot trying to find a solution:







These are my specs:

Cpu: Ryzen 5 5600
Gpu: 3060ti
Ram: 16gb
Motherboard: Gygabyte B450M
Drive: SSD 500gb Blink BM300
PCIE: 16x 3.0

Please let me know if any more info is needed.

Correction: the engine change happened back in 3.21 instead of 3.23. Sorry about that.

THIS person's video sums it all up perfectly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3kXH37yWeU

Take out your GPU, blow out the connection to free it of dust, then reseat the GPU.

You can use a program like GPU-Z to verify your PCIe is functioning x16 4.0

https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-gpu-z/

"

ps7ekken wrote:

Take out your GPU, blow out the connection to free it of dust, then reseat the GPU.

You can use a program like GPU-Z to verify your PCIe is functioning x16 4.0

https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-gpu-z/

Thank you for the reply! Unfortunately i reseated my gpu a few hours ago and cleaned it up to test this out and it didn't fix it. On gpu-z it still shows "pcie 16x 4.0 @ pcie 16x 3.0" because my motherboard doesn't allow me to change it from 3.0 to 4.0.