Performance problems

My game path of exile 2 keeps freezing while Im playing and it's very annoying, can't play the game properly. Specs: CPU I5-9400F, GPU gtx 1660, 8gb ram, maybe 8 gb ram is a problem? But it shouldn't freeze the game every 30 seconds.

I forgot to tell you but I run the game on the lowest settings possible with 1920x1080 resolution.

Could you post a screenshot taken during / immediately after a freeze with the in-game metrics displayed? The default toggle for them is the F1 key. Just enable them the next time you start playing, ignore them, then try getting us a screenshot once a freeze happens.

It'll give some clues as to whether it's a networking issue, whether the game's choking on a single CPU core, or some other bottleneck. Otherwise it's a bit of a guessing game.

Also, could you tell us what the following are set to?

• Renderer
• Mode
• Upscale Mode
• Max Render Resolution
• Nvidia Reflex
• Triple Buffering
• Engine Multithreading

Renderer: Vulkan
Mode: Fullscreen
Upscale mode:NIS
Max render resolution: 77% 1465x770
Nvidia reflex: off
Triple buffering: off
Engine multithreading: on

Just some quick thoughts;

• Vulkan's not a bad API, but I wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia's 16-series of cards preferred DirectX - the older DirectX 11, in particular. Have you observed better performance on Vulkan?
• Logically, Fullscreen should always have the best performance. Occasionally games will do something weird and Windowed Fullscreen will perform better. It might be worth quickly testing Windowed Fullscreen, but I'd change back to Fullscreen immediately afterwards unless you notice a clear improvement.
• I was going to recommend Bilinear - but I looked into this, and apparently NIS has vastly superior visuals for essentially no change in performance. You learn something new every day!
• Max Render Resolution is another setting that doesn't look wrong as-is, however with Path of Exile II being in Early Access (and tbh GGG's proprietary engine being quirky on a good day), I'd be very tempted to try 100% 1920x1080, just in case it performs better. Again, it shouldn't - but if you're not seeing the performance you would expect to, we're as interested in potential game engine bugs as we are in which settings are intuitively ideal for your rig.
• Nvidia Reflex being off is what I wanted to see. I think they've currently hard-coded it being disabled, but I figure there's fewer chances of issues if it's explicitly disabled rather than it being "on" but not working.
• Triple Buffering being off looks good to me.
• Yeah, Engine Multithreading being on should be helpful. I see no reason to change this.

If you get us that screenshot whenever is convenient for you, we can try to use the in-game graphs to see where exactly the bottleneck appears to arise, and we'll go from there.

I thought that I recognised that CPU - i5-9400F Coffee Lake, released January 2019. That will be where the bottleneck is. I had one until a couple of weeks ago. It barely meets the minimum specs for PoE 2.

I had no end of long loading times, invisible enemies etc.

If you can't afford a new PC, getting more RAM might help. No guarantees though - I had 16GB and it still struggled.

"

xjjanie#4242 wrote:

I thought that I recognised that CPU - i5-9400F Coffee Lake, released January 2019. That will be where the bottleneck is. I had one until a couple of weeks ago. It barely meets the minimum specs for PoE 2.

I had no end of long loading times, invisible enemies etc.

If you can't afford a new PC, getting more RAM might help. No guarantees though - I had 16GB and it still struggled.

I struggle with this.

As a matter of principle, both you and OP have owned that CPU - I have not. Arguing from ignorance is a pet peeve of mine. The two of you have a lived reality with it; I have conjecture and assumptions. I can't really contradict you both. I mean, my last Intel CPU was 2012's i5-3570K.

I've essentially moved over to Apple's platform, and just kept around my old gaming PC because, well, "lol Mac gaming". It has an AMD Ryzen 7 2700X from 2018. At the time, AMD were still falling short compared to Intel on both clock speeds and IPC. Intel's products were objectively superior for gaming. The 9400F's 6 cores & threads still ought to be 'good enough' even in 2025, surely?

OP's playing at 1080p, except... they aren't really. They're playing at 1465 x 770p and upscaling from there. I am playing at 2560 x 1440p with upscaling disabled. OP says they've put all their settings on Low. I've Shadows & Global Illumination on Low, but everything else defaulted to High and I've never changed them. OP's game client periodically freezes. I've a fairly smooth ~85 FPS.

Now - likely every single one of those settings we've configured differently will be GPU-bound. Alright, sure. But even just the difference in resolution. OP's system is drawing 1,128,050 pixels per frame. Mine is dealing with 3,686,400. Their system is attempting and struggling to do a fraction of the work that mine is doing, and this is with an - on paper - objectively better CPU. That this is the end of the road for OP's CPU and there's nothing they can do about it seems wrong to me...

I do agree that the ideal for them would be starting over at this point - midway through 2025, the system they're rocking at the moment will definitely be showing its age.

My testing's not going to win any awards, but I opened Task Manager on my other display and ran around in PoE 2 killing a few low level enemies. Now, take this with a pinch of salt as I didn't attempt to mirror OP's resolution & other settings. But my VRAM usage hit 6.2 GB (OP has 6 GB in total), and my system memory use climbed all the way to 22 GB (OP has 8 GB in total). I'd assume our difference in settings would significantly impact the VRAM utilisation, so I would be moderately hopeful that a RAM upgrade could do a lot for OP - at least in PoE 2.

Of course, whether at this point they want to invest more money into their current system - or it would make more sense for them to start putting money aside for a new rig - only they can say.

"

"Sarno#0493 wrote:

The 9400F's 6 cores & threads still ought to be 'good enough' even in 2025, surely?

For PoE 1, yes. For PoE 2, no. I watched the CPU graph - it used to go ballistic. Not enough oomph as in GHz/MHz or whatever it is :P

Both games still rely too much on CPU.

PoE 2 also needs a beefy GPU. My RTX 2070 Super was fine. It had no issues.

Incidentally, I observed no difference in performance per se by changing graphics settings - it lagged and spiked and froze regardless.