Upcoming Video Memory Utilisation Improvements

@Chris

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A few paragraphs ago, we described our VRAM usage under this system as conservative. That means that our current implementation doesn't aggressively use all of your VRAM, and this causes players to get frustrated by assets being unnecessarily unloaded too early (for example, when you notice some items looking blurry for a short time).

Our engine team has been working on a better implementation that aggressively uses as much VRAM as it can to store as many assets as will fit. This is a good thing because users with mid-range or better graphics cards will experience assets being unloaded far less often than they currently do. It depends on how much VRAM you have, of course, but the issues that are currently attributed to resource unloading/texture streaming will be largely eliminated for many users. And of course, all of the above changes mean that users with low-end graphics cards don't experience crashes or frame rate drops when they run out of VRAM.

This was very interesting read.
Keeping in mind the current situation with accessibility to graphic cards can we get even more details?
I was planning to upgrade my old gtx 970 but currently it's not possible as better cards prices are insane.
So hearing that it will use better the memory available for GPU, my question s:
- will these changes improve performance for older generations like mine?
- how much VRAM is minimum, recommended, preffered?
- will for example 4GB be enough to run ultimatums without fps drops?
- any other suggestions for players stuck with old gpus?

PS. It would be soooooooo good to get some kind of benchmarks for different graphic cards with before/after.

allow me to remind you that you are making a video game that's supposed to be run on a high end computer dedicated to support a large game, not something to be sneakily played at work on a shitty win98 desktop

Thank you very much for the explanation. I've been very critical this league regarding the performance issues but mostly because I've had no idea what caused it. Not being sure if it's my computer acting up or if the game is in fact performing terribly has been very frustrating so I'm very glad you finally gave an update on the situation.

Here's to hoping for better performance moving forward. Excited for the patch. :)

I'm just going to wait until POE2. No more money for your company from me. No more game time from me. POE 2 better be good if you want your player base back, all I gotta say. As for me? I even purchased other games that can easily replace POE to hold me over until I inevitably try PoE 2, get disappointed because it's equally as broken as POE 1, and go back to the games I am playing now.

You couldn't even make league start playable anyway so what's the point?

fingers crossed!

That's a really nice change as i have a mid-range PC i'm experiencing alot of crash and freezes / slow
I hope this fix (Not all as i can expect) but at least make the game playable without me as a student buying a 5k$ pc to play PoE propertly

All nice and well but seeing how whole game completely crashed after introducing a a new MTX type leaves little hope for this fix implementation to be seamless honestly...

Running T5 map with not much juice, averaging 100fps, 80 in combat but when I walk over completed ultimatum trial I insta drop half of my fps even though my filter shows only 3-4 items there (all mobs on map already killed, not spamming any skills, no mtx just walking over dropped items). Pressing alt dips me to single digit frames and lags game windows for 1-2 seconds.

Empy video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wbUiVAQxLo&t=559s on this summaries it quite well. Unless this gets addressed (by for example lowering render quality of loot that filter hides etc) I wont be expecting much improvements. Hopefully we get back to pre texture streaming performance if luck permits.

One thing that makes we wonder, if the loading times are now increased and we have texture streaming on top of that why there is performance decrease compared to just having loading screens in the past (which were shorter)?

Honestly speaking this game is not a graphical marvel and for what it renders on screen it should be running way smother (in comparison to other games in ARPG genre).

My Spec:
RX Vega 64 (8GB), Ryzen 5 2600 @ 3,7Ghz 6 cores, 32 GB Ram DDR4, NVMe SSD

Hopefully this would make the game (much more) playable again to me. Ever since Oriath league (cant remember the name anyways) and the water update thing, the game became real slow for me, but still playable. I used to play on a laptop with intel igpu, but upgraded to an actual desktop just a bit after Oriath. There is no difference at all in my gaming experience. I still get the same black screen while the game is loading textures in Act 1 Lioneyes. Inventory items still take a while to load, and does so for every single map I enter. Even if i just opened my inventory before entering a portal. Gets real bad when there are other people with million particles MTX in towns. Have yet to play Ultimatum, so things might've changed, but I logged in not long ago and still take about the same time to load Lioneyes.

I do hope to know what your minimum VRAM size is. Currently am reserving 1 GB from my RAM to the IGPU, but might consider another G. Was gonna buy some cheap 750ti but the price just went up a huge amount since last last year.

If i were a betting man i'd bet that this actually bricks the game for 30% of people while the rest barely sees any difference. As per usual.

It's gonna be a nope from me dawg.

It is really interesting to read about your work in the current situation. Stay in touch please.