Shader Issues causing massive 'lag' spikes

Issue: Shader activity constantly spiking in maps, especially with merc abilities (and just starting a merc fight), finisher effects, and numerous other effects, especially involving league mechanics (crimson ore, for instance), all turn the game into a near-slideshow, even though my framerate tends to report consistent.

This is on the Steam version.

Here is an example of dispersing lifeforce in Harvest:


--------------------------------------------

Computer Specs (nothing overclocked):
AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT 12GB VRAM
32GB DDR5 4800MHz

AMD Adrenalin settings:


PoE settings:




I have tried the following:

* Enabling/disabling:
\ AMD settings:
- AMD FMF 2.1
- FreeSync
- Enhanced Sync
\ Game settings:
- Changing between all 3 renderers, DX12 appears to be the most stable
- VSync, all 3 modes
- Triple Buffering (on/off)
- NIS/FSR upscaling
- Setting everything possible to low
- Changing resolution (which seems to have no observable effect on framerate)
\ Other troubleshooting:
- Deleted shader cache (for all 3 renderers)
- Moved shader cache to NvME drive
- Uninstalled/reinstalled PoE, numerous times
- Built a new PC (the one I'm using here, this issue has been prevalent for years on my previous i7-8700K 32GB RAM, and with both the 7800 XT, as well as an RTX 3080)

I'm sure there's a ton else I've done over the years, as my career is in IT, with a heavy lean towards desktop support for at least the first 10 years. I'm happy to continue troubleshooting, but I am at a loss of what to look at next. Though it feels like the game could potentially use more VRAM. PoE also reports using <3GB of RAM, but in Task Manager, I see it up to near 23% usage at times. Currently, while idle in the Sacred Grove, it's reporting 1.4GB in-game, but task manager is showing 14.1% usage which is ~4.5GB.

I love the game, but it's incredibly frustrating dying to performance issues league after league. I don't experience this in the majority of newer games, including things like Satisfactory, which is CPU-intensive. I run 90 FPS as the minimum in most games and have a number of newer games that run at 240 FPS.

Please let me know if there is additional information I can include or what else I can do to help.

Thanks!