Serious performance issue with Shaders/Textures

same

To give you an idea, I was always playing at 60 fps with my 1050 and 2GB of VRAM without any problems.

Until there were changes after version 3.25.
From then on, the problems just kept getting worse.
I've been troubleshooting the graphics issues and I've seen what's happening to you, and it's both normal and not normal at the same time.

What I mean by this is that, over time, they modified something related to how the engine handles textures (among other things) and how they are presented to the graphics card.

I did a troubleshooting run where, for example, if you have 2GB of VRAM (in my case),
the game, with everything on low plus the Nvidia settings (in my case) to further reduce the VRAM size of the textures, only consumes 1.5 to 1.7GB of VRAM.

And it spikes up to 2GB.

When you go to the tree in this league to create an item from its core,

and open the tree, in my case, the game's FPS or frame pacing drops drastically and it enters a "RESTRICTED" state marked by Windows. You can check this in Process Lasso even if you force the game to use a real-time performance profile or start it that way, either through a program or by creating rules in the registry for the Path of Exile process.

So what's happening?
Unfortunately, they made it so that when the game communicates with the graphics card, specifically through the graphics API (in this case, DirectX 12, which is the default), it handles itself poorly or enters an inconsistent state, like a loop it can't escape. If the game exceeds 1.5 to 1.7 GB of VRAM usage, it enters a state where it "tries to lower the textures to the minimum." This should theoretically produce better performance, but it doesn't, resulting in the effect you're experiencing where you have to wait, for example, 5 to 10 minutes, before it resumes.
During this time, the graphics engine and DirectX 12 don't know what to do, haha. Then, something "adjusts" and your VRAM consumption decreases because the engine, and even the API, offloads some of the VRAM that isn't being used at that moment.
That's when the game returns to its normal state.
This didn't happen before, and it's a clear example that something is wrong in that phase where the game needs more VRAM to continue running. But it seems the problem occurs on all graphics cards, not just mine, but all the ones I've seen mentioned in posts and on the game's forum.

There's a transition that isn't being handled well, and GGG isn't doing anything about it.
It's not always noticeable, but it does occasionally appear on newer graphics cards or those with more VRAM. However, on cards with at least 2GB, this happens constantly.

And for the record, this didn't happen in the previous league.

So they changed something and ruined it.

In the first image you can see the visual and FPS bug, plus a very large FPS drop and the disk usage at maximum for some inexplicable reason to me.



In the second image, you can see how the FPS drops completely, and you can also see the VRAM usage when this occurs.
Furthermore, you can also see the red area in the FPS UMDs, where it's clear that the game's FPS stagnates, producing the red graph that indicates a performance problem.

That seems to make sense, especially since DirectX 11 and Vulkan use significantly less VRAM, and these problems don't occur with them.

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lasstt1#7686 wrote:

That seems to make sense, especially since DirectX 11 and Vulkan use significantly less VRAM, and these problems don't occur with them.

Regarding DirectX 11 and Vulkan, I can tell you that:
DirectX 11 handles VRAM better and more effectively in Path of Exile.
This is also true for Vulkan; it handles VRAM better, but it's not the best, since when Vulkan runs out of VRAM, the game crashes or you get visual glitches like this:




or it crashes, telling you:


or any similar error.

But it all boils down to the same thing: when the ggg engine plus the API in question hits the PHYSICAL limit of your graphics card, since there's no good mechanism to overcome reaching that limit or "clean something up" to prevent it from being reached,
all the bugs discussed in the forums are generated.
This also generates the error that everyone is experiencing, where the loading screen is slow. If you have roughly 8GB of VRAM, you won't see that bug anymore, and yes, it IS a BUG.

The engine should have mechanisms or a way to resolve this.
Furthermore, if you notice, the bug that takes 5 to 10 minutes becomes increasingly severe if you have less VRAM and the engine and graphics card use the available RAM as shared virtual memory for the graphics card, loading things into RAM, which doubles the time. And this happens because there are characters with their MTX or skins in the game in the area where you are.
Because if you go to your hide, this doesn't happen, or if you go to the hide in the tree of this league, it doesn't happen either.
ggg should be fixing this, and on top of that, they should add an option that completely cuts off and doesn't load any MTX into VRAM, and that would solve the problem of slow loading times in cities, etc.
By the way, we first saw these problems in Path of Exile 2. Then they appeared in PoE 1. And while they made changes there to fix them, they haven't brought any here.
In fact, they're causing even more lag.

I know I've never had problems like this before, I think the graphics were "improved" to retain more of the players who came from PoE2, which I understand makes sense after all it's a company. But it seems like the rest of the fan base was simply ignored. I keep thinking if it wouldn't be possible to make something like DX11 much more graphically simplified by removing some effects like wisp, that only causes lag, who cares about those little sparkles and other effects that you can't even see on the screen, they just steal resources, those who have been playing PoE1 for years don't care much about graphics, so just leave DX12 with more effects.
I don't know, I just wanted to be able to play.

The VRam theory doesn't seem quite right, considering tons of people with more modern cards and higher tier ones will have 8+ gigs of VRam. Mine in particular has 16 gigs.

And ironically, my VRam usage is almost non existent with the game right now. 3 gigs out of 16 is in use, with everything maxed out in the graphics settings.

PoE2 has the same problem, my GPU sits idle most of the time in game, while my CPU tries to get melted while standing in an empty part of town.

It makes me think this is an age old problem with PoE's newer engine and renderer coming back, when they first switched over to it and they had constant issues with VRam usage and texture sizes.

Heck ... PoE says it's using 4.1 Gigs of memory, while windows task manager says the game is using 7.8 gigs. I don't think PoE's tools can accurately track what is going on right now, because the engine itself doesn't know what is going on right now.

Shader loves to get stuck on maxed out, while Drive freaks out the whole time in town until shader goes away. Not sure what's left for the shader to do after years of compiling and a week in the new league already. Maybe if GGG didn't try to clear it every league, or have the game download / compile it with the patch instead.

And I'm still sitting with a gpu that's bored af. What does it even need shaders on my physical drives for at this point?

"

JoeShmo#1872 wrote:

The VRam theory doesn't seem quite right, considering tons of people with more modern cards and higher tier ones will have 8+ gigs of VRam. Mine in particular has 16 gigs.

And ironically, my VRam usage is almost non existent with the game right now. 3 gigs out of 16 is in use, with everything maxed out in the graphics settings.

PoE2 has the same problem, my GPU sits idle most of the time in game, while my CPU tries to get melted while standing in an empty part of town.

It makes me think this is an age old problem with PoE's newer engine and renderer coming back, when they first switched over to it and they had constant issues with VRam usage and texture sizes.

Heck ... PoE says it's using 4.1 Gigs of memory, while windows task manager says the game is using 7.8 gigs. I don't think PoE's tools can accurately track what is going on right now, because the engine itself doesn't know what is going on right now.

Shader loves to get stuck on maxed out, while Drive freaks out the whole time in town until shader goes away. Not sure what's left for the shader to do after years of compiling and a week in the new league already. Maybe if GGG didn't try to clear it every league, or have the game download / compile it with the patch instead.

And I'm still sitting with a gpu that's bored af. What does it even need shaders on my physical drives for at this point?

The problem isn't how much VRAM your graphics card has for the game engine to use.
Rather, it's that when the game engine communicates with the graphics API and the graphics card, a problem arises when it reaches a certain VRAM limit.
For example, at 2GB of VRAM, the game uses this faulty mechanism that produces the errors we all mentioned.
You also say it consumes, for example, 3GB, but what exactly is the limit for the graphics engine at which it starts using its fallback system to enter a "low-resource mode"?

And how does it then exit that mode without affecting game performance?

Additionally, you need a good program or the necessary tools to know exactly how much VRAM the game is mapping or consuming, and you also need to know if any VRAM is being transferred to system RAM.
You can force the engine to store resources only in VRAM, without transferring them to system RAM.
This is achieved with some options in Vulkan, or you can configure the operating system, through the Nvidia driver, to prevent a fallback to RAM when the graphics card runs out of VRAM.
There you'll see how much VRAM the game is actually using.
The option in the Nvidia control panel is CUDA - System Fallback Policy.
This was generally implemented for the CUDA stage when it was requested that the graphics card not load VRAM into system RAM when, theoretically, it wasn't running out of VRAM for artificial intelligence, but I believe this also applies to games.

By the way, if you load the game specifically without the fallback system, you're literally making it load much faster. You're telling the graphics card not to load into system RAM and to transfer everything to VRAM.
Some people might benefit from this if they have a lot of VRAM and the game doesn't use that much.

Same thing happens to me — even when the shader bar stops being green, the network still fluctuates between 30 ms and 12 000 ms (yes, 12 000). It’s not my internet, because at the same time I test streaming or other games and they work fine with no lag. It’s only PoE, and it started a few days ago — the first 3 or 4 days of the campaign everything worked perfectly the whole time.
I’m running a 4080 super and a 5800X3D with a Gen 4 SSD and about 200 GB free.

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daroher#6242 wrote:

Same thing happens to me — even when the shader bar stops being green, the network still fluctuates between 30 ms and 12 000 ms (yes, 12 000). It’s not my internet, because at the same time I test streaming or other games and they work fine with no lag. It’s only PoE, and it started a few days ago — the first 3 or 4 days of the campaign everything worked perfectly the whole time.
I’m running a 4080 super and a 5800X3D with a Gen 4 SSD and about 200 GB free.

The green shader bar indicates that something is loading in the background in a loop or never finishes loading shaders.

If you go to the game folder, you'll see about 89,000 shaders.
They're roughly 1 GB or 1.5 GB in size, or more, depending on everything you've loaded during gameplay.
It's true that when something loads incorrectly, you experience a latency spike in the Path of Exile game engine because it somehow affects your connection to the server.
Perhaps it's doing some kind of check from the server to your client.
I think I've noticed that in DirectX 11 it's always green, it never goes down. In DirectX 12 it's green most of the time until it occasionally goes down.
In Vulkan, it goes up when a shader loads.
In all cases, I wonder why the disk read or write speed goes up to 500 MB/s? It's a shader and they only weigh 7kb or at most 50kb.

"

supremexdfull#3081 wrote:

The problem isn't how much VRAM your graphics card has for the game engine to use.
Rather, it's that when the game engine communicates with the graphics API and the graphics card, a problem arises when it reaches a certain VRAM limit.
For example, at 2GB of VRAM, the game uses this faulty mechanism that produces the errors we all mentioned.
You also say it consumes, for example, 3GB, but what exactly is the limit for the graphics engine at which it starts using its fallback system to enter a "low-resource mode"?

And how does it then exit that mode without affecting game performance?

Additionally, you need a good program or the necessary tools to know exactly how much VRAM the game is mapping or consuming, and you also need to know if any VRAM is being transferred to system RAM.
You can force the engine to store resources only in VRAM, without transferring them to system RAM.
This is achieved with some options in Vulkan, or you can configure the operating system, through the Nvidia driver, to prevent a fallback to RAM when the graphics card runs out of VRAM.
There you'll see how much VRAM the game is actually using.
The option in the Nvidia control panel is CUDA - System Fallback Policy.
This was generally implemented for the CUDA stage when it was requested that the graphics card not load VRAM into system RAM when, theoretically, it wasn't running out of VRAM for artificial intelligence, but I believe this also applies to games.

By the way, if you load the game specifically without the fallback system, you're literally making it load much faster. You're telling the graphics card not to load into system RAM and to transfer everything to VRAM.
Some people might benefit from this if they have a lot of VRAM and the game doesn't use that much.

Right, that's kinda my point. The comments above mine were indicative of physical memory limits being reached, and cleanup protocols being bugged out / ineffective.

My comment points to an inherent flaw in the system itself, like it's not recognizing sizes bigger than 2-3 gigs ( probably as much as the first memory module for the graphics card ).

This would make sense in a scenario where you partitioned your system harddrive to only .. say .. 15 gigs, but your OS grows to 16 with system updates. Your harddrive should realistically have more modern values, like 500 GB of storage, but something ( in this case, you making a partition error ) is making everything think you only have that 15 GB.

And in terms of PoE and graphical memory, the in game tracker says I'm using 3 gigs of VRam, but my tools I use myself to track my system usage says I'm only using just over 1 GB of VRam. Hence my commentary about how I don't think the game's engine knows what is going on, and could be entering into issues not actually happening because it thinks it's using resources that it actually isn't.

If I had to make a speculative observation, I'd find it odd that the game says I'm using 4 gigs of system memory, and 3 gigs of graphical memory ... and then my managers say the game is using 8 gigs of system memory, but 1 gig of graphical memory. Almost as if the game engine isn't utilizing the graphics card at all, and is loading everything entirely off the harddrive, and thus system ram. Which with a bogus shader cache .. makes a lot of sense. So the game is reading a combined system and virtual memory as different things, but they're pulling from the same actual physical place.

I can't fathom why GGG would be stuck with an issue cropping up at 2 GB of VRam, what is this? 2008? Which also means I'm kinda baffled that people are running video cards still that even have those values, even if money is tight. You should be able to get a 6gb just about anywhere for bargin bin prices. And should we even be solving issues that stem from such old hardware?

That said, I'm still of the mind this isn't a physical limitation, and is instead a software one, entirely on GGG's part. And if they can't make a game with graphical options so low that you could run this game on virtually nothing that it had back in 2012 .. it's a complete failure. This new engine / renderer has been nothing but problems since they swapped to it. If you told me it was secretly Unity, I wouldn't dismiss it.