Persistent Performance Issues Since Last Major Patch

I want to preface this by saying I've been playing off and on since shortly after the launch of early access and haven't had too many problems. I've never gotten a steady 60 FPS on this game with my computer, and I'm generally okay with that so long as the experience remains relatively smooth. I'm willing to forgive a few stutters here and there as I know this is still early access.

I custom built this PC a while back and have made a few upgrades here and there since then, but it's currently running a Ryzen 7 2700 eight-core (3.20 GHz) CPU, 32GB DDR4 2400 and a GTX 1660 Super with 6GB VRAM. It's not the best GPU on the market or anything, but I've had few issues with it.

However, after the recent major patch to the game, as soon as I start up the game, it bottlenecks my CPU and VRAM before I even log in. I can maintain a steady 60 FPS now that I've lowered the shadow and lighting settings, even under these conditions, but after a certain amount of time passes, the game gradually turns into a slideshow and becomes utterly unbearable to play. I present the screenshot below to illustrate this, but again, the CPU and VRAM spike starts whenever I launch the game. It just takes a few minutes for the FPS to drop to this unbearable level and become inconsistent and enter slideshow territory.



Validating my game files only fixes the frame rate until the problem creeps back in, and it persists through restarts, only "resolving" itself when I validate my files again. Though sometimes not even that works. And even when the frame rate is good for those few minutes after login, the CPU and VRAM remain basically capped out.

did you turn audio quality to low (or what is audio channel count low? something like that).

It's been better for me since then, but my CPU will still get "destroyed" at random places at random times.

ryzen5 5600x, rx 6600, 32gbram, linux mint 22.2

Also, after I got this screenshot, I exited the map, and then the game. Upon exiting the game, both my monitors went black and periodically lit up via their backlights, then went dark again, backlight again, dark again, backlight again, etc; until I forcibly shut down my computer and booted it back up again. That has never happened before, but I took it as a sign that I probably shouldn't play this game anymore until I've heard some indication that these issues might be fixed.

I did try lowering the audio quality, but I didn't fully commit to it 'cuz I've got audiophile hardware. I'll try it and get back to you, though.

check out https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3852015

Performance is a big issue this patch.

Changed the sound channels to low, restarted and it persists. Drive (both my primary and secondary internal drives are SSDs, btw) goes up and down a lot, from empty to more or less what you see in this screenshot, but shaders are permanently maxed out and CPU and VRAM are pretty close to capping out. I haven't opened a map yet, but I suspect I already know what's going to happen when I do.



This is after I went into the POE2 subfolder in my AppData folder and deleted EVERYTHING there, then uninstalled and reinstalled the game, just in case there was a problem with the shader cache. Apparently, whatever it replaced them with wasn't any better.

I'll try the suggestions from that thread and get back to ya. Thanks!

Edit: That actually helped a ton! The graphs still look similar to the screenshots, but I'm no longer subjected to slideshows and was able to clear a map of all its monsters with no issues.