[FIX GUIDE] Solve Shader-Related FPS Drops & Lag Spikes in Path of Exile 2 (PC)

Hey Exiles,

Its TwitchTvMaxlMantisGer with my first greater guide on how to fix lag problems in poe2.

Over the past few days, I’ve been struggling with heavy FPS drops and stuttering in Path of Exile 2, especially when encountering Breaches, Boxes, rare monsters or dense packs. Even outside of combat, the performance was inconsistent. After some deep digging and trial-and-error, I found a solution that significantly improved my performance — and hopefully, it helps some of you too.

The rest are nvidia settings, cpu, game settings, and yeah, also game issues.

🧪 How to Tell if You Have Shader-Related FPS Drops
Press F1 in-game to show the performance graph.

Go to Options → Graphics and set Graph Details to “All Graphs”.

Look at the Shader graph in the top right.
→ If you see constant spikes when engaging enemies or entering new areas, it’s likely the shader cache is your culprit.

✅ Step-by-Step Fix (NVIDIA, Windows 10/11) ((For AMD you have to do the steps with AMD settings))



1. Clear Shader Cache
Go to:
%APPDATA%\Path of Exile 2\

Delete any folders starting with:
ShaderCacheVulkan or ShaderCacheD3D.

2. Increase Shader Cache Size (NVIDIA)
Open NVIDIA Control Panel → Manage 3D Settings.

Scroll to Shader Cache Size and set it to 100 GB.

(Default is often too low and causes cache flushing.)

Click Apply.

3. Force High-Performance GPU in Windows
Search for "Graphics Settings" in the Windows Start Menu.

Under Graphics performance preference, choose “Desktop app”.

Click Browse, and add both:

PathOfExile.exe

PathOfExile_x64.exe
(Or whatever the PoE2 executables are named.)

After adding them, click on each entry → Options → set to High performance (should list your dedicated GPU, e.g., “NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super”).

🔁 Final Step: Restart PoE2
After doing all of the above, restart the game. In my case, shader spikes disappeared and the framerate became much more stable — even in hectic combat or large maps.

🧠 Optional Tips:
Update your graphics drivers (clean install if needed).

Avoid switching between Vulkan and DirectX3D unless necessary.

Use an SSD (preferably NVMe) for PoE2 — shader load stutters are worse on HDDs.

Disable background apps that may interfere (like Razer Cortex, overlays, etc.)

If this helped you, feel free to share your results or post any alternative fixes you’ve found for PoE2 stutters — let’s help the community enjoy smoother gameplay! 🙌

Add me on Twitch.tv/MaxlMantisGer to talk with me or share your experiences.

Stay sane,
Exile

W

It is 2025 game and relies heavily on CPU. Still it is on EA phase but i can assure anyone who is reading this get a powerful CPU with some good cooling. Don't be afraid when you enter a new map because game loads shaders first. I used to have AM4 3700X upgraded into 98003xd and everything is flat out high FPS. In short if you see FPS drops your rig is old&outdated. Upgrade it.

helpful

helpful, sadly for shader optimisation NVDIA removed the option to change de cache size in favour of doing it automatically (on some of the recent pilot)

Ofc in my case it want to use 10 gb despite my 1.2to available space.

Edit : After a clean reinstall of my driver the option to change cache suddenly appeared.

"

VolkiRosso#4831 wrote:

It is 2025 game and relies heavily on CPU. Still it is on EA phase but i can assure anyone who is reading this get a powerful CPU with some good cooling. Don't be afraid when you enter a new map because game loads shaders first. I used to have AM4 3700X upgraded into 98003xd and everything is flat out high FPS. In short if you see FPS drops your rig is old&outdated. Upgrade it.

No, it isn't an "outdated rig" problem. I have a 4080ti and an i9-13900k with 64gigs of DDR5. I also run my games from a 990 evo SSD. I STILL GET STUTTERS/FREEZES. This is the only game I have issues with.

Your guide? You mean ChatGPT's guide?

"

dx5231#2516 wrote:

Your guide? You mean ChatGPT's guide?

Hahaha right? Dang near word for word from CrapGPT....What is worse, is that trash don't even work. It doesn't fix anything at all.

It won't work, the guy just want sub as he mentionned his twitch channel.

None of the above will work... (the 2 first comment are his minions friends)

all guides are trash, the probleme is GGG not our hardware.. if they want to fix then they will, but since they exist they havent given an absolute damn... their code is full of bug and cleaning it will 100% be impossible [Removed by Support]

It's fun how a 2500$ 2025 Asus g713 with 4080rtx and amd 7945HX see fps drops to 30 on maps.. where I do run all game in 2k at 200fps. (Oh yeah downscaling to 1080p wont even make me gain fps, which make no sense)

GGG= LLL

[Removed by Support]

This is a repost of a reddit post that already gave these steps.

They don't work.