Game Optimisation and Misleading Player Complaints
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Raise your hand if you at some point went:
"I'M DYING TO LAG" Since launch, PoE2 has had this issue where players seem to be making this callout on repeat. Leading them to check with internet service providers and focus on network issues to seemingly no avail. Causing a bit of a headscratcher for the dev team and leaving players still... "Lagging" to death. I feel it necessary to actually call this out because I believe it has led to a misconstruing of what the problem really is and that's optimisation. Players who are "Lagging" to death are actually experiencing frame drops, substantial increases to this are: - When first spawning into a map - Opening a strongbox (Who else avoids these in PoE2? I sure do) - Encountering Vaal monsters (previously improved on in 0.2) - Going into "Town" - Lightning spells are fun (Looking at you, Frenzy empowered Lightning Spear from 0.2) - Act 3 Gateway The actual issue for this is likely due to the poor Shaders and poor Mesh optimisation, a seemingly running issue for GGG (Note how even in PoE1, you can't change Texture Quality to below Medium) What are Shaders?: Shaders, in essence, are what makes the things look pretty, they utilise code to tell your PC to draw certain images, the more complex these are, the more images your PC is told to draw. Normally, textures (The images) are sent to your VRAM to be cached and loaded at set times (This is normally done during the loading screen, but GGG seems to only do that for a portion). After this, once you encounter the Material(s)(These are what contains the Shaders in question and are applied to Meshes), depending on the complexity, your PC is told to draw these images. This is sent to your CPU to process and are called Draw Calls. Most notably, you'll see this happen when you go into a new area and you get those massive FPS drops, then you start getting hit by unrendered monsters. This normally means too many Draw Calls are happening at once and your CPU can't keep up, so even if your VRAM is fine, you'll see your CPU usage spike to 90-100%, creating those freezes and even game crashes. What are Meshes?: Meshes are the OBJECT when referencing 3D models, if Shaders are what makes things pretty, Meshes are the physical object itself. Mesh = Square, Purple Square = a Mesh with a purple Shader These are also important to call out, Meshes contain what's called Vertices and those are what makes up the entirety of the object, think of it like the skin of what we want to make. These act as the deformation points (For things like bending arms and legs) as well as the canvas for painting our images on. The reason these can be problematic is that when you have more Vertices (Which may be done to make the Shaders appear better and movements look smoother) the heavier the performance cost. This is referenced as "Poly count", "Tri count" or "Quad count". Now that the general info is out of the way, What can the player do?: Quick answer? Virtually nothing. Long Answer? No matter how good your graphics card is, too many draw calls, poor render timing, and lack of appropriate distance culling/occlusion will still cause severe performance issues. Lower graphics settings, different Renderer types, and stronger GPUs won't mean there are less Draw Calls being done at once or less Poly Count in play, this is why people with even 5000 series NVIDIA cards are complaining the same as those with 1000 series cards. These higher series cards may help slightly due to render speed but won't help on the CPU end. The more costly solution is to get a stronger CPU, draw calls are done on that front and if there are very poorly optimised multi-pass shaders in play, this could help you run it a little more smoothly as a player. High processing speed matters for this in particular. Short-term solution, though. What can the community do? - +1/bump posts like this one, it's a serious issue that's slipping under the radar and affects everyone - Help GGG gather real info on the specifics of the issue, by default F1 opens the performance stats, if the Shader section is lit up in green and you encounter specific mob packs, load into certain maps and fragments/sections of the world is missing as you travel, mouse over invisible monsters, etc. screenshot/record it. Post it here or in a new post - Complain about the shader optimisation - Complain about mesh optimisation - Voice that you value playing the game more than over-the-top visuals Fix priority is typically tallied by a team and then brought to development, the more complaints of similar type kicking around, the more likely it is to be actually sent in and looked at. A pass over Materials and Shaders is needed. Some optimisation ideas to look into for development: - More extensive texture atlasing! This is done by combining meshes and UV Maps and then creating essentially a mega texture over all of them, commonly done for 2D sprites and the like, it can range across an entire world build. This may increase the visibility of UV seams and more precise texture labour but allows you the use of a single image in place of potentially hundreds, saving a lot of I/O overhead - Recycle and reuse texture images wherever you can to save on Texture Memory and draw calls, hue shifts for reskins in place of recreating Texture Images are an example of this - Consider using monsters from the same pool as the current map the player is in when a strongbox is opened, this will reduce draw calls and enhance VRAM performance in a single instance dramatically. Because the monsters are already fully rendered and loaded, they won't increase PC or GPU load when the strongboxes are opened - If possible, render monsters on map load. While this may increase load times, it's likely a lot more ideal for players to wait an extra minute or so than to "Lag" and die, especially with Hardcore considered. Wasting hours on hours of time spent leveling a character, or waiting some minutes for monsters to render in a load screen Dernier bump le 25 oct. 2025 à 03:05:04
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TL;DR
Complain about Shaders not lag |
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Please I love the game, I just wanna be able to play it on my expensive computer that I bought to have no problems on any game, right now it stutters so much, I was really excited for the league and now loggin in and playing 10 minutes I'll be like "yeah I love the game but I CAN'T play this.
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" Good call out! This is also my main killer and all too common for most, a harsh FPS drop while surrounded by monsters is certain death and such a sad way to go |
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0P knows a lot about shaders but never tried setting shade cache to unlimited? don't worry it wont fill your drive up, it just prevents cleanup. this ameliorated any lag/loading time for me to the point its not perceivable- i recommend you give it a try 0P, cheers
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" Actually a fantastic pointer for player-side attempts to remedy the issue and provides an interesting talking point, thank you for bringing it up While an unlimited cache setting may assist somewhat, (I love the use of ameliorated, that's my first encounter with the word) this doesn't particularly assist on the end of draw calls and CPU load, so the I/O overhead is still high. Additionally, setting a shader cache to unlimited may cause no issue for those with ample storage, but what it does do is grow indefinitely without limit and so users with limited storage can experience serious performance issues on their PC as a whole as their drives are filled and they run out of space for critical functions and/or files. IF this method is recommended and you're using it, I would additionally recommend you manually check your shader cache periodically and clear it so that the unused and outdated shaders get cleared out (Though, GGG does actually tend to do this with each major patch for you). The long story short of this is that a shader cache set to unlimited may help smooth performance in the short term, but it comes with potential risk to the player's PC health overall and won't assist players experiencing issues arisen from overall CPU load. Cheers though and still a phenomenal suggestion to throw out there! |
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" hmmm this is getting very sus. you should not clear any cache manually on modern systems. the cache folder doesn't grow indefinitely i already mentioned that, had mine changed on day 1. also how does it not help with CPU load if the shaders can be re-used? i highly recommend it, and frankly not sure why devs don't make a sticky about it. there is also plenty of ways to improve game performance for CPU if its bottle necking the game. personally i think the game is well optimized compared to few years ago, i was able to do v0.1 maps on a mid tier PC from 2015 so that's impressive in my book |
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" Hi again! Unsure if you might actually be referencing PoE1 here in this instance? PoE2 has only been available for public play since December 9th, 2024 (Around 9 months), unless I'm misunderstanding and you're comparing PoE1's state 3 years ago to PoE2's current state. My bad in that case! That said, you can manually clear a shader cache using either the Windows Disk Cleanup tool or by navigating to the specific cache folders for your graphics driver, you can also navigate to PoE2's specific shader cache and clear those as well. The only consideration is the longer load time on first launch, as they have to cache the fresh new shaders. "the cache folder doesn't grow indefinitely i already mentioned that" Unfortunately this statement did and does need correction, prevention of any cache cleanup does equate to an ever growing cache folder, which inevitably results in higher file sizes. To explain in detail, any unchanged shaders will stay for use, resulting in a quicker load time, but once a shader is outdated, say from a patch or hotfix, it'll sit in that cache for eternity. However, the new shader is introduced to the cache, which adds another new file to the folder. With that, I'm sure you can decipher why it grows now! |
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I actually dont think it's that simple.
It's not asset problem, it's something wrong with the data loading pipeline I always just see my SSD at very very low usage, why? Something is wrong in the data fetching process...  |
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" Save, I have a very expensive PC. I can play other high end games in max settings. But for POE (1 and 2), it keeps stuttering. Even with low settings wtf. |
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