Performance Improvements

I live in Dallas and can tell you that the tech is deployed in a very patchy way. Just down a street in the same zip code you can have a radically different experience regarding ISP speeds. I think this is what is happening with the servers here. Something happens and it switches to another path (not sure what the tech jargon is for this) and all of a sudden you are on a route that hasn't been updated since last century.

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Xavderion wrote:

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Comfyasabadger wrote:

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Mr_Dude wrote:

Good News.
I really hoped for some big performences imrpovements and here they are. Hope next thing to change will be new QoL Improvements as well (still hoping for nice Minion Overview and build in Jewel Overview :) )

Is it possible to make an Option for "Low Texture" or "Lower Graphics"? I really enjoy all the beautiful Art but sometimes it is hard to follow the game because of too many particles, lights and Skilleffects (when I'm playing Whispering my buddys still have FPS Problems in Partys... would be nice to change those :) )

You can change some ini setting to reduce texture quality:

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/177500

This wouldn't solve his problem though, it's all about the particle effects. Reduced texture quality only means lower VRAM and memory bandwith usage. Only useful for very old rigs.

It do improve performance. I needed to mess with the ini to clear Dominus ages ago, when I had a HD 5670.
Which is weird, because texture quality tends to never impact performance in games, so I assume it makes particles less taxing.

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kolyaboo wrote:

I live in Dallas and can tell you that the tech is deployed in a very patchy way. Just down a street in the same zip code you can have a radically different experience regarding ISP speeds. I think this is what is happening with the servers here. Something happens and it switches to another path (not sure what the tech jargon is for this) and all of a sudden you are on a route that hasn't been updated since last century.

Your ISP is shit, and the cables connecting you to the internet is most likely rotting apart.

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Chris wrote:

Memory Usage, Synchronous-Load Stuttering and Load Times
If an asset isn't loaded on one of these screens correctly, then it stalls the game client to load when it appears for the first time. For example, opening a Strongbox can generate a random Rogue Exile. If the effects or microtransactions that that Rogue Exile uses aren't already loaded, then the client stalls, potentially in a very dangerous way.

On the other hand, if we opt to not preload assets, then there's significant stuttering that occurs during gameplay when assets are encountered for the first time. On slower hard drives, or when virus checkers or disk fragmentation are in play, the freezes related to synchronous loading can be quite long. This is unacceptable during combat, for obvious reasons.

With lockstep you gave us the option to always be in sync with the server. What if you make that bidirectional regarding the synchronous loading? Would it be expensive to give an option to pause the simulation until the assets are fully loaded? It could behave this way:

• Server sends its simulation's information
• Client responds that something in that information is not yet loaded
• Server pauses the simulation
• Client loads the assets while displaying a non-intrusive message
• When assets are fully loaded, client sends that it's good to go
• Server resumes simulation

In normal situations all assets are preloaded in the area loading screen, so it would only happen when opening a strongbox or other event like that. That pause is happening anyway, but the server is disregarding it. Just make the server aware and it is "fixed" or at least made acceptable in combat.

In theory it's a great idea. even if it increases the load on the server by a lot.
In reality you cannot use such freakin function because of hacks. With your idea, we can pause the game whenever we want, how we want, very easily. A little hack to force the loading continuously, deleting an asset from the memory and reloading it... I believe it's relatively easy to do.

It's because of the hacks that the client is always wrong and the server always right ;)

I have a question. Why won't you port Path of Exile over to Vulkan? Not only would it make Path of Exile cross-platform, but it would also have better performance than DirectX 11 due to less GPU overhead and asynchronous threading.

As a programmer I appreciate the detailed post. While not going so far as to allow confusion to non technical people. I do thank GGG for the post and openness, and I'd like to express from my own experience if someone doesn't believe how much time and effort goes into performance dev. It is honestly some of the hardest dev you can do when trying to squeeze more out of a 90% performative program or system and gets exponentially harder the more squeezing is done.

Thanks for the hard work GGG :)

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Geisalt wrote:

With your idea, we can pause the game whenever we want, how we want, very easily. A little hack to force the loading continuously, deleting an asset from the memory and reloading it... I believe it's relatively easy to do.

It's because of the hacks that the client is always wrong and the server always right ;)

True. But it can be easily detectable as the game wouldn't free soon to be used resources mid instance. If the client sinalizes that it loaded the asset and then it sinalizes that it needs to reload the same asset again in the same instance, it would raise a foul play flag and should be an automatic ban.

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del_diablo wrote:

It do improve performance. I needed to mess with the ini to clear Dominus ages ago, when I had a HD 5670.
Which is weird, because texture quality tends to never impact performance in games, so I assume it makes particles less taxing.

5670 is 4 times slower than the 750 ti, it's equivalent to a GT 440 or a 9800GT! It's 200% badder than a 4870 and it's a 8 years old graphic card. In Short, the 5670 is not a graphic card anymore but a chipset to launch the windows desktop if your CPU nor your motherboard have a graphic chip.

The newest graphic chipset included in the Intel cpu is better than the 5670 and the 440gt.
(they lack decent drivers for video games but...)

and AMD GPU chipset is far greater than the intel one ;p


5670 cannot handle thoses textures. It's not because the textures are performance heavy... It's the 5670's fault. It was already a cheap card in 2010 and i do not expect it to run poe decently in 2016. It's bottlenecked by 64 000 MB /s memory bandwith when a normal game in 1080 P needs 100 000+ to be "safe". In short with full texture it will stutter a lot and the fps will be drastically decreased by the memory limited speed, Enjoy 20 FPS constantly.

Also, it could be a hard drive problem with IDE connectors, when the game loads 1 Gb of textures, the hard drive matters a lot.

I'm having MAJOR issues with this game. There's nothing worse than doing Merc Lab,spending a good 45 mins in there and getting disconnected....I have never had these issues with POE before or any other game I play on my PC. I'm glad your trying to fix these issues but honestly I'm almost done with this. I love this game and it's free,but its almost unplayable. Hope it works out....

:'( 2017: Linux = 2nd Class citizen
Why not ditch DX and go for Vulcan?