Technical assistance requested: Performance issues and inquiry about optimization

Hello GGG,

I originally sent an email to support, but I was redirected here to report my issue on the forum. I am truly seeking your help as I've exhausted all other options.

I am writing to you because I am exhausted and truly need your help. Since the start of the 3rd league (The Third Edict), Path of Exile has become incredibly difficult to play due to frequent crashes to the desktop and severe performance drops. These issues occur everywhere: from the campaign acts to high-tier maps and the Vaal Temple.

I have already exhausted every known solution:

Clean installation of the latest GPU drivers.

Full game reinstallation and clearing shader caches.

Testing all available renderers (DX11, DX12, and Vulkan).

Implementing various launch parameters recommended by Reddit users.

Despite having a powerful PC, nothing has helped. This is devastating for me because I spend over 12 hours a day in the game and I don’t want to stop playing due to technical hurdles I cannot fix myself. Please, look at my game logs—you will see how many times I crash. My system becomes overloaded, the PC freezes, the game closes, and I have to restart over and over again.

In the community (forums, Steam, in-game chat), many players mention a third-party optimization tool (the so-called "smoother") that removes certain effects and corpse models to stabilize performance.

My question is: Am I allowed to use such a third-party tool if it is used exclusively for performance optimization and provides no competitive advantage?

I really need your help to find a way to improve performance so I can play without constant fear and anxiety. I want to enjoy the game without breaking your rules and, most importantly, without crashes. I decided to contact you directly for assistance in resolving these issues.

Thank you in advance for your time and for any help you can provide.

I see people post they have powerful pc's all the time, when in reality they mean a 5600x/16gb 3200mhz ram/8gb gpu. It would be helpful if you actually told people what your setup is. The game can easily get over 8gb vram depending on settings, so be mindful of that.

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mahfightmoney#5093 wrote:

I see people post they have powerful pc's all the time, when in reality they mean a 5600x/16gb 3200mhz ram/8gb gpu. It would be helpful if you actually told people what your setup is. The game can easily get over 8gb vram depending on settings, so be mindful of that.

I've got a 5800X3D with 32GB ram and a 16GB vram 7800XT and see performance issues as well. Many of the issues I experience are not related to a "general" inability to run the game well. My loading times are good, and in my hideout and during mapping usually I maintain a very smooth frames and things look great and the game plays very comfortably. This is probably 95%+ of the playtime.

During specific moments, or in specific areas, the performance stalls out entirely - go from a smooth 90-120FPS to literally none. Complete slideshow, or damn near close to it. Can't even press escape to pause - and if I do, the menu shows up however many seconds later it takes for my computer to stop having a hernia. Sometimes more than 10+ seconds. All I have to do to experience this is walk into or be in the wrong area with the wrong mobs. No skills necessarily required, although some do make it worse.

It seems related to character models, as the problems usually rear themselves most when monsters appear from things like Abyss, or corruption, but also seems to show up the most when there's Karui mobs, or certain monster buff-auras, and it happens more frequently on certain maps like Bastille/Grimhaven. It's ALWAYS an issue for me (no matter my settings for anything) in act 4 Heart of the Tribe. The problems disappear or at least become substantially mitigated if I have a gloom shrine and manage to kill all the monsters (which removes corpses/character models on death), which is why I think there's a problem here at least partially related to the character models themselves.

The problem has existed for months.

I've made my own post here:

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3911942