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

The shader cache increase is the solution for Nvidia. The game obviously needs some optimization.

Even after these fixes, if you play for long sessions, you still may eventually get stutters or long map loads or even the dreaded Grinding Gears of Death that black out your screen and reset your map exploration. The best solution is to restart the game every few hours. This has completely stopped these issues for me (playing on an RTX 4090).

This fixed my FPS issues. Thank you.

The link to your twitch is not working. Is there another place I can find your channel?

if you have any solutions for AMD users post it cause we can't change shader cache files with adrenalin software, just reset them.

Worst solution possible.
Changing my hardware only because I have insanely bad performance?
Games have low settings for such things.
I have 8core past-gen cpu from AMD it is still insanely good with other games.

I think there are other fps drop issues out there that are not necessarily shader related. I have a 4080 super and will see frame drops happening when i load a new map or occasionally after exiting a menu. However I don't really see more than a brief spike in shader operations. I noticed that my cpu and gpu time are both 5ms, even during these periods of unstable frame rate. i turned off vsync and the stutter goes away, but obviously now i have frame tearing.

so i think there may be an issue where the game occasionally becomes out of sync with vsync and is unable to produce frames on time, leading to frames being dropped. For me this seems to happen when i zone into a map and goes away after 30-60 seconds.

So maybe try turning vsync off if you have it on and see if that improves the frame rate.

The only solution to this POE2 before start should initialize Shaders which is ok even if it takes 5mins then playing the game or they ll let players download game shaders to go asynch while playing. Rest is NASA computer to play without problems.

Besides that this don't work, increasing shader cache to 100gb requires extra 100 gb of storage on system disk.
Which won't happen

Imagine players trying to fix gggs problems. GGG at its best.

That is not 100% GGG issue. It is related to how "big" is game, how many unique effect and combinations you can have. That is heavily taxing shaders.

This little tweak helps a lot in many AAA games and it is just, that POE1/2 heavily benefit from this.

There should be some shader related optimizations, like pre-compiling them, maybe some minor optimizations here and there ... but game needs new engine or some custom built-in shader cache management. Like aditionAL option to allocate aditional RAM for caching compiled shaders.

I use all of my 96GB RAM to run this game smoother and it helps a lot. Using steam fossilize to precompile all shaders, then store them in my 24GB RAMDISk and then using 40GB RAM as cache for game (this gives minor benefits).

Steam managed shaders are like 1/4 size of default ones and ignore that shader cache limit of NVIDIA/AMD.

GGG built-in shader cache is just 1GB on top of default cache. With this size I think they could preload it automatically in RAM and they are not caching everything, because default GPU cache is usually compiled only if game cache doesn't exist. So their built in shader management have low hit ratio.

To be honest, GGG can improve it but it is mostly related about GPU drivers not handling it properly and game design. So we need workaround from GGG.

Update: Steam fossilize is throwing me errors about cache file size >1GB. So to properly handle shaders, I think we must have some GGG workaround. It seems like game is compiling more complex shaders than 3rd party solutions can handle.

To be precise, it throws this error.
src\tier1\fileio.cpp (2482) : cbToRead <= 1024 * 1024 * 1024