Achieved a mostly stable 120 FPS with an i5 and 3060

Hello, I am posting this to possibly help anyone else who was struggling with major performance issues. I had large FPS drops and high CPU usage most of the time playing POE2. I have an intel i5 12th gen cpu and an nvidia 3060 12gb gpu. I researched for hours on what could possibly be wrong, and I didn't think that heat or lack of memory were an issue at all [I do have over 16gb of ram]. But I'm going to share all the things I had done to achieve stable performance and I now have 100-120fps consistently when mapping, sometimes it drops while loading shaders for rituals and breaches but that is normal.

Step 1. Make sure you revert to a pre 570 graphic card driver. I went back to the last one before the 50 series that seems to have issues. I am using 566.36 [ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/details/237719/ ]. Do CUSTOM install and do a full install clears all prior settings and everything.

Step 2. Go into the nvidia app or control panel and set shader cache size to 10gb or any higher option. I do also use high performance mode. Also type in the windows search bar "graphics settings" and scroll down and click browse to find the poe2 location and add it there. When its added to the graphics setting menu below click on it select high performance with it showing your gpu.

Step 3. In your windows search bar you're going to now search for edit power plan, then click on change advanced power settings. You want it on high performance, but go to processor power management-> click on + for minimum processor state-> set it to 0 (i have no idea but this fixes some stutters for people)

Step 4. This is for people like me who have multiple ssds. I did have windows and things like that on a separate ssd from where I store games, and POE1 had a "shader cache" button to click where the shaders were saved. POE2 does not have that.

First you need to go delete the shaders your game already made(I would delete path of exile1's shader folder too if you have one). I believe the previous shader file is located in appdata->roaming such as "C:\Users\*****\AppData\Roaming\Path of Exile 2". Personally I took this time to search my computer for all shader files and delete all old ones I could find that I for sure wouldn't need for a game I play currently. Make sure you follow all of this up with EMPTYING YOUR RECYCLE BIN
I would follow this by going to your ssd where the games are saved and creating a new file called "shader" or something. After we must manually go into the config file to change where it stores the shaders.

My config file was saved in "My documents" under path of exile 2. [C:\Users\****\Documents\My Games\Path of Exile 2]
Once you find that folder you want to click on poe2_production_Config (or even search for that file name) and add a line under [GENERAL] that says "cache_directory=H:\"SHADERFILENAMEHERE"\Path of Exile 2"
or simply put it will be "cache_direction=" before the location of folder for shader, with no spaces between the equal sign and the file name. Your game should now build shaders in that folder you put, and having this shader folder on the same ssd as my game I believe helped out a lot with loading and shaders causing loss of fps/high cpu usage.

Hope this helps anyone else who was struggling like me. Now I am excited to LOG IN

Thanks for this guide, I did what you mentioned and it helped me immediately. It plays better right away.

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BlackAegnor#8647 wrote:

Thanks for this guide, I did what you mentioned and it helped me immediately. It plays better right away.

for sure!!! i think there is def a shader optimization problem that causes the crazy high cpu usage still though in the coding of the game somewhere. that will be up to GGG to fix lmao

Huge improvement. Was getting FPS in the teens. Now hovering around 60fps. Was already running driver version 566.36, so I'd try having people just delete their shader cache and seeing if that fixes it.

Great troubleshooting. Moving the shader cache folder did wonders. Kudos!