My 5090 will arrive too late :'( I will be in juice red maps too early

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VoidWhisperer42#5989 wrote:

Every purchase is made with careful consideration, ensuring I don’t settle for budget solutions that underperform, only to replace them later at a higher cost.

This is the way. It doesn't apply to all products but there is a popular idiom: Buy cheap, buy twice. But I totally get it, fomo is a thing and some people just can't help themselves. Still, settling for a worse product only to replace it at a loss seems so insane to me.

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Pashid#4643 wrote:

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BaumisMagicalWorld#0673 wrote:

Titan cards aren't meant for gaming, though. I was talking about gamers when I said that, not general use.

To be fair this card was quite fine for gaming back in the days. Just doesn't quite meet today's standards anymore with better and cheaper options being a thing.

Yes, that was before consumer grade cards became really good render cards, too. RTX Titan was a $2500 GPU that is on par (in gaming) with a 2080 Ti. A card which nobody really buys anymore today, either, as it's power hungry and outperformed by a 3070 and within the performance of a 3060 Ti, a card that you can get for ~€200-250.

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Sadaukar#2191 wrote:

I really hope u invested the same amount of money into a capable CPU, because that's much more important than the GPU for PoE.

Anyway, I think this thread belongs to the Offtopic section.

Oh yeah : it's quite sad how poorly both PoE1 and 2 are optimized CPU-wise.

It's very clear to me now that I upgraded from a RX 470 (4 Go) to a RX 9060 XT (16 Go) and it barely changed anything for PoE2 (and looks like PoE1 neither, but more testing is needed).

I would have thought that it would have been some game with a ridiculous number of entities that would make me think about upgrading my CPU (like Factorio : Space Age), but nope, looks like it will be PoE 2 !

(In some areas in the PoE2 campaign I have FPS dropping to 30-40 (even after shader calculations have finished) due to CPU according to graph, even when no enemies are around !?!)

P.S.: As a relevant counter-example, D4 was already smooth on medium settings (except in zone transitions, but that was fine), now it's smooth on max settings too. But then Blizzard is still known for caring about optimization (for their in-house titles at least), and, well, if dungeon runners were foods, D4 would be shallow candy...

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VoidWhisperer42#5989 wrote:

[...]
We're not in 2018 anymore, where hardware was in high demand and options were limited. It's 2025 now, and people have a lot more choices
[...]

Midrange cards are now nearly two times more expensive though.

(And I'm not even sure whether low-end even exists any more outside of integrated and discrete Intel ??)

So I guess a bunch of people are going to be stuck having to use second-hand at best ?

Meanwhile I'm still rocking my Aorus GTX1080Ti...

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Aldora_the_Summoner#4021 wrote:

Meanwhile I'm still rocking my Aorus GTX1080Ti...

Which is totally fine. This is what it was like for me with a GTX 1080 and i7-13700K: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj89f6AYCtE And that's on the more extreme end. It's a Blight-Ravaged map, after all.

I currently play in 4k120 with RTX HDR and a few other bells and whistles, so I kinda need my 4080. X3D CPUs make a big difference for PoE, but anything higher than 16 Threads won't do anything because that's the maximum the game supports.

CPU in this game matters significantly more. You want your CPU and GPU frametime graphs to be roughly the same, which is why I upgraded a tier higher because my 7600X3D was getting pegged and bottlenecking my GPU too much. For any other builds that weren't this madness, I was getting super smooth performance with the 7600X3D.

Chain damage calculations on monsters is probably not parallelisable due to inherent dependencies as with a lot of other calculations. In this case, more cores isn't going to help because code is single-threaded (can only use 1 core).

I imagine when lots of stuff are exploding, you're bottlenecked by your maximum single-core performance for that calculation that must be run single-threaded.

It's always a good idea to watch out for single-threaded performance when buying hardware.

Hmm, now I'm confused :
PoE1 shows 28-30ms per frame for CPU in my PoE1 hideout,
while none of my cores are going over 65% in btop ?!?

So my bottleneck might actually be somewhere else ??

EDIT : Oh wait, was I stupid and didn't notice shaders being calculated ?
It's down to 18-19ms now.

Still the same thing for core utilization (average a bit lower now) - but what is bottlenecking me ?? (at 50 FPS now)

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BlueTemplar85#0647 wrote:

Hmm, now I'm confused :
PoE1 shows 28-30ms per frame for CPU in my PoE1 hideout,
while none of my cores are going over 65% in btop ?!?

So my bottleneck might actually be somewhere else ??

Potentially, but CPU usage only checks for total usage. Single cores could be pegged at 100%, but that's not reported. Best way to determine a bottleneck in this game is to press F1 and run the content you normally run. Then keep an eye on the red and blue bars. If the red bar is constantly full and the reported milliseconds are much higher, you need a better CPU or change settings that impact CPU performance. And vice versa. There's a lot more to it, but that's just the easiest way to do it.

Edit: Oh, and don't forget to cap your framerate.

I'm saying that none of my cores are over 65%.



(Running PoE1 windowed, just to be sure, no framerate capping.)

(Also, kind of surprised the GPU would still be used so much.
But here too... 75% ?!? While only using 27% of maximum power ??)

P.S.: Maybe btop is as useless as the Windows whatever-its-name-was monitor for this : IIRC doesn't show properly when a single core is being maxed out because the core in question is constantly «jumping around» (for temperature spreading reasons), so the average looks less than 100% ?

EDIT : Yes, looks like this is what is going on, I can briefly see one core after another being pegged at 100% if I increase btop's polling to per 100ms :
EDIT 2 : better with animation (with a slight recording overhead) :


P.P.S:

"

or change settings that impact CPU performance

And what settings would that be ?
I tried to find any in PoE2, there were none (except for Engine Multithreading, which of course significantly lowered performance when disabled).

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BlueTemplar85#0647 wrote:

P.P.S:

"

or change settings that impact CPU performance

And what settings would that be ?
I tried to find any in PoE2, there were none (except for Engine Multithreading, which of course significantly lowered performance when disabled).

I'm not 100% sure. GGG doesn't tell us in-game.

You could try Vulkan renderer, as that's a bit easier on the CPU. Enable Triple Buffering. Reduce channel count in audio settings to Medium or Low, or disable sound effects altogether in the config file.

Those are the ones that I know off the top of my head. For the record, PoE 2 is even heavier on the CPU. Like, significantly so:



This is from a while back, when I still had a 7600X3D.

Edit: Just checked your CPU performance. Yeah, that thing is kinda ancient. The i5-12400 is a 6C/12T CPU that costs around €130 and is more than 3x as fast in Multi-Core, and more than 2x as fast in Single Core. I'd say you need an upgrade, mate.