Community Alert: PoE2 Performance Bottlenecks

There is clearly a growing concern within the community about the performance issues in Path of Exile 2, especially with the upcoming shift to a free-to-play model. Even though the game is still in its paid phase, many players have reported lag, frame drops, and stuttering—issues that are particularly noticeable during group play.

Players with high-end systems (for example, those using configurations like 7800X3D/RTX4080) are experiencing only about 20–30 FPS during combat situations, there's many examples on the forum.

From my personal observations, it appears that the game is overly dependent on disk I/O, causing bottlenecks during critical moments such as asset-loading in busy combat scenes. This is not a problem only for low-end systems; even SSDs or NVMe storage are unable to alleviate it, which indicates that peak hardware users are also affected. With the expected increase in the player base once the game goes free-to-play, these issues could significantly hurt its popularity.

There is also speculation (infact I'm almost certain) that the performance problems may stem from the fact that the zones are dynamically generated, requiring assets to be loaded and decompressed in real time as players progress through each zone. Such a design could be a primary contributor to the observed bottlenecks.

Other titles like League of Legends and Fortnite have prioritized ensuring that their games run smoothly on low-end PCs, which has significantly broadened their market share. By optimizing performance for a wide range of hardware, these games remove barriers to entry, allowing gamers with less powerful systems to participate and enjoy competitive play. This inclusive design strategy not only increases their user base but also fosters a larger, more diverse community, which in turn boosts longevity and player retention. The ability to run effectively on lower-end systems has been a key factor in their global appeal, as it enables players from regions with varying economic conditions to access and experience the game without needing to invest in high-end hardware.

With player satisfaction and the long-term success of the game at stake, I would urge the development team to take these concerns seriously. I recommended that funds are to be allocated to a dedicated specialist team tasked with addressing these performance issues full-time. Optimizing performance now can make a huge difference in how the game is received by the broader audience once it transitions to free-to-play.

Please +1 the post if the performance issue is a detriment to your gameplay, let's get this fixed!

Thank you GGG!

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fistbang#5541 เขียน:

T if the performance issue is a detriment to your gameplay

+1

Based on my tests—and highlighted in the accompanying image—it appears that real-time shader compilation is contributing to performance issues in the game. The tests reveal that during periods of intense gameplay, the overhead from compiling shaders on the fly significantly impacts frame rates and overall smoothness. This suggests that, in addition to heavy disk I/O and dynamic asset loading, shader compilation might be another bottleneck affecting the game's performance.



A similar issue was recently addressed by Marvel Rivals devs after complaints were made.

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Since our launch, we've heard your battle cries through the community and customer service channels—players on various PC configurations have encountered performance stutters and crashes, often due to high memory consumption during gameplay. PCs equipped with 16GB of RAM or less, when faced with excessive RAM usage can force the system to use swap memory, leading to unwanted slowdowns in the heat of battle.

https://www.marvelrivals.com/news/20250408/40185_1225743.html

+1

My new character I just got to endgame is seemingly bricked from loading into the game. If this is the case I won't be playing until at least next league. I can overlook a lot of crashes and bugs but bricking my new character at this specific point is a rug pull I'm not interested in standing back up from.