Shader compilation
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I like this game, but the lack of shader compilation prevents me from playing it properly, it's really annoying. The lack of shader compilation makes me just not want to play this game, which always hogs my CPU and SSD.
Last bumped on May 14, 2026, 9:38:48 PM
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Agreed. Just an option to precompile shaders from the menu would go a long way. But tbh I think there are also some issues with cached shaders not being used and constantly being recompiled.
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It seems this is all impossible, since the game engine is so old. I don't know why GGG didn't make POE2 on the Unreal 4-5 engine.
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" It's not supposed to recompile constantly or everytime you start the game, it compile once it sees new data and that's it, after a while everything will be cached and it won't happen again. However if you change your videocard driver or change the in-game API (Vulkan to D3D for example), it will compile again. Also make sure shader cache size is unlimited or very high. Tech guy Last edited by Warrax#2850 on May 13, 2026, 9:47:21 AM
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I tend to get better performance from DX12 over Vulkan.
Using 7800XT and 5800X3D, 1440x3440 on Ubuntu, playing on Steam through Proton. No upscale - NIS, dynamic resolution OFF. I had used Vulkan ever since it was available in PoE1 and in 0.1, 0.2 without issue. I never considered using DX12. 0.3 is where I would get INSANE CPU lag especially in act 4 areas or some endgame zones with act 4 or abyssal mobs. I actually just put up with it while trying to tweak different combos of every single other graphical setting with mixed results but nothing great. In the beginning of 0.4 I discovered that switching to DX12 fixed it. I hardly get any perfomance issues now and keep everything maxed. Wish I had switched sooner. I haven't made any manual adjustments to any shader settings on my computer at all - I have enabled Steam to pre-cache shaders. I also deleted the existing shader cache when I switched from Vulkan to DX12 and it went from 80GB to 26GB Who am I to say anything, I don't respect my time either. Last edited by karsey#2995 on May 13, 2026, 10:27:55 AM
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" When you delete the shader cache, the game launches quickly, but you have to wait for the shaders to load again, and then a week later the game takes a long time to launch again and you have to delete the shader cache again. Now, when I select any parameter in the graphics settings, the game freezes for 10-30 seconds, it’s strange Last edited by Ryan123321#5087 on May 13, 2026, 12:43:38 PM
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Never had a problem with the game launching quickly or slowly and there is no noticeable difference now. I only deleted the shader cache because it seemed unreasonably large and I thought I'd just let things re-assemble themselves hopefully in a more productive manner. I don't think it was actually related because I can still switch back to Vulkan and get the same performance issues as before even though the disk space of the cache is much smaller and it doesn't change or grow.
Switching from Vulkan to DX12 in the menu typically results in the "spinning gears" for a few seconds and that's it. The Vulkan issues only show themselves when I get into specific kinds of graphically demanding content. It sounds like you have some other problems if you are just toggling any item in the menu and seeing game freezes. It would be worthwhile to establish if it's your whole system that's freezing or if it's just the game (ie. can you alt-tab to another application or ctrl+alt+delete and manually close the process, or is your entire computer unresponsive). If it's the game, you might see solutions around verifying your game files or re-installing or something like that. If it's your whole system... well you might have API issues or driver issues or disk issues or other software interference or even hardware problems. That would be more difficult to troubleshoot from this forum. Who am I to say anything, I don't respect my time either.
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"Loading from the SSD works, but I don't know what exactly it's trying to load or how much. I don't have "read-only" enabled. As I said, the game prefers to work with the SSD, and that's rather suspicious. |
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" Just to clear up some misconceptions: * The PoE engine is actually much younger than the Unreal engine, and just like the Unreal engine, most parts of it are well maintained and frequently updated. Just because there's no major version number written behind it doesn't mean that it's current state is not on-par of other "modern" engines (though obviously Unreal is a much more general-built engine, while the PoE engine is very much purpose-built for PoE). * PoE2 actually ships with roughly 600.000 offline precompiled shaders per backend. That's around 10-30 times as many shaders as your typical Unreal game has - and, as you've noticed, it's still not all shaders that the game needs (it covers about 95%, though). * There is constant work going on to improve the shader situation in different ways. |
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