Game is unplayable. Extremely long loading times + non-stop shader cache compiling.

Loading times in this league is unbelievably long. I played before in previous leagues and I'm very much aware of how bad my laptop is. But no matter how bad performance got in previous leagues, it was never this bad.

I'm also noticing in the performance graphs (F1) that the green shader bar is constantly full, implying that shaders are constantly loading, no matter how long I stay in one zone. normally in previous leagues it takes about 2-5 minutes in one zone for the shaders to stop loading. In this league, even in my plain act1 hideout, shaders are loading non-stop. I'm also constantly crashing in the loading screens. I've spent hours in the damned loading screens and I'm still in the campaign. I would've been in the endgame doing maps by now.

Also every time I boot up the game, despite the infinite shader compiling, visual effects appear invisible and take minutes to show up.

I tried:
-deleting my shader cache
-increasing the maximum shader size in nvidia settings
-changing power plans, including a power plan with disabled c-states
-updating my graphics driver
-packcheck.exe
-changing api, dx11 works best, vulcan and dx12 are trash
-changing the shader cache location to a different partition in my hard drive (I only have one) using the link cmd command line
-closing some apps, I closed riva turner and cpu park control
-manually changing preferred gpu in both nvidia settings and windows graphics settings
-changing the graphics settings, they're all at their lowest. engine multithreading on/off didn't help, neither did triple buffering
-completely turning off sounds in the production_config file

I should also mention that I was asked to update my graphics driver when I first booted up the game, which is fair since I haven't played PoE in a good while and my graphics driver is kinda outdated. since league start I've updated the driver twice (581.57 and 581.80)


Here's my specs:
-i7 7500u
-8 gb ram
-gt 940mx
-a single 1 tb hdd

Please someone look into this. Something has gone terribly wrong with the game this league. It was never this bad before. The game is literally unplayable. It's genuinely a miserable experience. It's a gamble whether I make it past the seemingly endless loading screen or get stuck into infinity and eventually crash and not even making it into the game. I'm so so so done with this.