Stuttering every other patch.

I'll preface this by saying that I do not know what I am looking for to fix, which is why I made this post.

Some context:
Ever since Ritual my performance has gotten into a cycle basically. GGG releases a performance patch, my performance becomes as smooth as I would assume I could get with my current setup (no stuttering at all, locked 60fps unless I'm running a super stacked map).
Shortly after a league releases, performance gets worse and its very noticable (massive stuttering, FPS start to get lower and lower by patch) and one month or so into the league the game becomes unplayable even at early acts. Mapping is out of the equation because anything that spawns mobs in my screen gives me massive dips in performance (influence, expedition and harvest are REALLY noticable) and I'm forced to quit until there's another performance patch.
This wasn't a thing before Ritual, but ever since Ritual this has happened and I'm currently on the downslope of the cycle in Expedition.

This does NOT happen in any other game, even in World of Warcraft while raiding with 29 other people. While my FPS do get lower in those cases, which is normal as there's more particles being rendered, I do not stutter at all.

As for my specs:

CPU: i5 4460 @ 3.2GHz (default speed)
GPU: r9 380 4GB
RAM: 16GB DDR3 1600MHz CL10
And I'm running PoE on a NVMe SSD.
GPU Drivers are up to date.


As for what I've tried:
Deleting the Shader cache to have it reload everything, which didn't really fix the issue.
Mess arround with Vulkan and DX11, DX11 was even worse than Vulkan.
Force -preload on startup, made things worse.
Enable Dynamic Culling, actually noticed some improvements with this.
Tried both Standalone and Steam clients, no difference.

I made a small video of me just running around in Ledge killing stuff with my performance graphs all turned on as I had noticed they were very wonky when compared to streamers and friends which I asked to turn on their performance graphs for a minute or two for comparison.

This is the performance run in Ledge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOhVQ53uBEo


Anything that I might need to post for more info just ask for it, if it can help.
Last edited by flashywow on Sep 19, 2021, 9:53:24 AM
Last bumped on Sep 19, 2021, 3:53:20 PM
The graph actually shows you where the issue is at.
The CPU.
As to what's wrong there, that's everyone's guess.
You could check if your game is using all the cores.
Check temperatures during gameplay, could be heat.

No rest for the wicked.
"
Daiena wrote:
The graph actually shows you where the issue is at.
The CPU.
As to what's wrong there, that's everyone's guess.
You could check if your game is using all the cores.
Check temperatures during gameplay, could be heat.



You were right and I ended up fixing, for now the issue, I think.
After checking temps they were unusually high so I decided to check BIOS and eventually check if my thermal paste was still OK and ended up finding issues on both sides.

Seems to be running fine now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8lcKcA862w.


Would there be a reason for it to be noticable on PoE only though? The stuttering, not the temperatures. Or was it sort of life confirmation bias on my part that the issue was caused by PoE?
No problem.

PoE is CPU bound, depending on what other games you were playing, it could just be that this game pushed cpu hard enough for it to show it's cracks.
No rest for the wicked.
"
performance has gotten into a cycle basically

I think this is because since 3.14.3
"
local cache […] is automatically cleared once every league launch

The cache is located by path specified in production_Config.ini
"
[GENERAL]
cache_directory=

The most significant part of the cache is ShaderCache, once it's deleted the game client has to re-calculate effect at least one time when the effect occured. This cause a temporal lag each time you encounter a new effect.

Majority of AAA games rather use the one time shader cache generation procedure, instead of "unpredictable lags for a week" you'd get "30 minutes shader generation" idling.
Problem: impostor syndrome
Solution: nerf everything
Result: depressing mess

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