Bloom in Path of Exile

I read that article and I don't envy your situation but it just doesn't match with my PoE reality. I went from the best ever performance in late 3.10 with Vulkan to the worst performance ever in early 3.11.
I've already kind of settled with the game looking green and mushy again without ReShade but the extra washed out look of the bloom you#re using is really destroying the look. I don't know if you kind of pre-empt that a lot of people have monitors with too much blue light, too much saturation and too much contrast by default but I don't have any other game in the hundreds I played on this configuration that looks so washed out.
I'm currently redownloading the whole ggpk file in hopes that at least the deadly asset loading freeze on some events may improve (and here I thought we were finally beyond those issues). I'm tinkering with the options, graphics driver versions, launch options, sound driver/hardware configuration. This is the most tehcnical frustrating league (since closed beta). In the others with big issues it was usually one thing which made it work ok again, like playing without sound for some months but now, it's just a mess. There are so many different issues and only some people are having some of them. If this game was any less addicting and comforting for me, I would deem it currently unplayable and hope for the next league although I don't really see something that makes me hopeful that this whole technical mess you're in now will suddenly be whole again.
I just looked through a few screenshots from this league in search for comparison shots with/without ReShade and at least I had a laugh at all the glitches and messed up stuff that this league featured. I hope at least PoE 2 can redeem itself with a proper fresh tight technical standpoint.

That statistic of how many people had Bloom on Default/Normal probably matches the amount of people who don't touch the options at all. Or some people indeed play on 120% Saturation/Contrast/Brightness.

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I re-download the ggpk about once a year, seems like this was the league that needed it again, went from 35GB to 27GB and asset loading and basic performance seems to be a lot more stable. But I changed multiple things
(gateway outside my country, Vulkan to Direct X again, fresh ggpk, something I already forgot) and I'm too tired to do test runs to isolate their impact right now. Maybe I'll know more tomorrow, only did one map with little going on in it. For now I'm just happy that Direct X seems playable for me again. I like how PoE is an evolving game but man, those constant growing pains and technical fiddling.

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Gateway didn't seem to matter, Direct-X still unplayable but Vulkan and the fresh GGPK file make PoE playable again. Should have done that at league start with the new renderer being implemented. I also have a league start routine of archiving old client files, deleting shader caches (I know that means small "lags" once when recreating them), minimap files and old announcement picture files. I wonder how many people even do such a cleanup. There are probably people out there with a 3GB client.txt and a 40+GB GGPK. Maybe GGG should put something in the patch notes to tell people about some of those or even do some of those automated. But I bet I'm not the only one suffering from serious performance deterioration from all the patches and expansions.

<edit3>
Asset load troubles came back with a vengeance and killed me twice. Trying to avoid any of the extra stuff in a map feels bad. Noticed I still had "--waitforpreload" and removed that, which at least made PoE start up a bit faster and might seem to help a bit in general? This game became so arcane when it comes to technical issues, I feel like I need to perform some voodoo rituals before playing to appease the performance demons to let me play without dying to game freezes. -_-

Anytime Baran shows up in a map my computer lags considerably, I have a really good feeling this has to do with bloom on the lighting attacks. I also get really bright squares that just show up all over the screen. I have already turned bloom to slight and am running Vulkan. Please please please let us disable it, its ruining game play!

I cant believe the rudeness of some of these ppl! Saying that GGG is lazy or incompetent is way out of line. First of all the game is free! Secondly, I challenge you to find a gaming studio that cares more and communicates better with the community! All the hard work put in to this game is clearly evident and anyone who cant see that should find a different game to play or at the very least find a more constructive way to communicate their criticism.

First and foremost, it seems unwise to base broad development decisions off what "most players" leave a *default* setting to. If most people don't bother to change something that doesn't mean that thing is good - it means they don't know how to change it or it's not bad enough for them to bother. If they have not seen an alternative to compare you cannot assume it's any good.

But more to the point at hand - bloom is the first thing I turn off in almost every game or, at least, bring down to lowest intensity. Everything being horribly fuzzy and glowy just looks pretty bad. 3D graphics look nice because they are crisp, and bloom directly fights against that. Torches and such I can see, but when every armor piece, light source, spell effect, etc. all spew forth fuzzy bloom you just lose view of the game itself and it tends to get muddy and bad.

I ended up not playing Harvest much because the skill choices didn't really change things up enough to warrant digging in, though I did like the Harvest mechanics, but I'm definitely one of the players who is always leery of bloom.

And hey, I mean, no offense to your artists, but there's no accounting for taste. Maybe some of them genuinely like having blown out bloom cranked to a thosuand, doesn't mean most your playerbase will.

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Hellsfortune a écrit :

I cant believe the rudeness of some of these ppl! Saying that GGG is lazy or incompetent is way out of line. First of all the game is free! Secondly, I challenge you to find a gaming studio that cares more and communicates better with the community! All the hard work put in to this game is clearly evident and anyone who cant see that should find a different game to play or at the very least find a more constructive way to communicate their criticism.

Are you kidding? Does Digital Extremes ring a bell? Warframe was and still is a game where the communication goes both ways and guess what, they do listen. They have a vision of what they want but aren’t arrogant to impose bad decisions unto their player base.
Here you have one man vision and it’s force fed with excuses as sidings. Either it’s the artists vision, the player to player interactions, you name it.

I guess that you aren’t the one that can’t see it.

SO many people play old runescape and LOVE It for the way it is and not the way it looks

you can put makeup on a pig its still a pig

Learn to optimize your game for gods sake...

My 2-year old Laptop cant handle POE anymore - meaning I cant play with it anymore. RIP 1k usd Laptop.

Also,
a) the game is WAY too fast paced nowadays.
b) flippers, bots and RMT'ers are controlling every possible market there is. PLEASE bring an Auction house into game.

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Cudez a écrit :

Learn to optimize your game for gods sake...

My 2-year old Laptop cant handle POE anymore - meaning I cant play with it anymore. RIP 1k usd Laptop.

Also,
a) the game is WAY too fast paced nowadays.
b) flippers, bots and RMT'ers are controlling every possible market there is. PLEASE bring an Auction house into game.

This topic is about BLOOM.

If you have a suggestion that can be of value, please don't hesitate to post in the suggestion forum.

Thanks for your continued support!

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Cudez a écrit :

Learn to optimize your game for gods sake...

My 2-year old Laptop cant handle POE anymore - meaning I cant play with it anymore. RIP 1k usd Laptop.

This happened to me aswell, granted my laptop was a potato. But I legit brought a new desktop worth $2500 JUST FOR POE!! Expensive choice for just ONE game. Hopefully future upgrades don't kick me out of the market again!

I really don't understand what all the fuss is about. The game looks and performs just fine and I have bloom on normal. And lets face facts people, the game has gotten too big for a standard laptop.
GGG Rules, keep up the amazing work!