TEXTURES NOT LOADING PoE 2 0.4

Struggling with invisible monsters and bosses, background loads but assets ontop doesnt load for some reason, even did a fresh install of the entire game aswell as switching drivers and nothing solves it, problem started getting really bad on the 24th for me

This topic isn’t even visible in early access bug reports section!
GGG tell us what to expect.

My boys (and girls LOL girls playing video games):

After ~2 weeks of testing, these are the only things that make the game playable for me right now.

1) Shader disk cache

__GL_SHADER_DISK_CACHE_SIZE=10737418240


(Set in the launcher. You can increase it further, but in my experience, it doesn’t change much.)

2) Renderer workaround

DX11: unusable (severely degraded performance).

Vulkan: crashes with a fatal error (already widely reported).

DX12: the only viable option.

The problem is VRAM management.
When VRAM reaches a critical state, textures degrade heavily (washed out, missing icons/assets), even though FPS remains stable.

The only way I’ve found to “flush” VRAM without restarting the game is:

Switch DX12 → Vulkan

Immediately switch Vulkan → DX12

This forces the engine to release VRAM, bringing usage back to ~1.3–1.4 GB.
After that, the game runs fine again until the next map or until VRAM fills up once more.

This is obviously a terrible workaround, but it’s the only thing that works for me.

From what I can tell, this league introduced much more aggressive VRAM retention (shaders/resources not being released properly). On low-VRAM GPUs, this makes the game borderline unplayable.

I’ve been playing Path of Exile for ~6 years, and this is honestly the first time I can say:
"I want to play my favourite game, but the engine won’t let me."

Ps: This screenshot should tell GGG something 30k shaders created in a pc that is barely playing the game...

I have exactly same issues, regarding everything u reported.

Hi!

Under Debian(Trixie) i got just some stuttering. So i tested some Launch Options.
My Baseline Command, that Worked with Proton Experimental, GTX1080:

`__GL_13ebad=0x1 %command%`

I stole that one from another Post, it masks something in the driver as AMD Device, if i remeber correctly. Timeshift (backups) where ongoing and i had more stuttering as usual,

so i tried some different things that caused the missing Textures:

`__GL_SHADER_DISK_CACHE_PATH=/path/tomy/nvme`
`__GL_SHADER_DISK_CACHE_SKIP_CLEANUP=1`

--waitforpreload is, as i understood trough threads, the same as the options above. Omitting --waitforpreload should bring back all textures ->

but will cause shader stuttering? . On the other Hand i got some stutters even with all those Commands and missing textures, timeshift is done so i will go back to my "Baseline" that worked. But performance wise, 0.4 is a clear upgrade in terms of performance. Could also be that i started using those Baseline Launch Options with 0.4 that caused a performance gain.

Hope the Info helps

Alright thought I’d post because this has been happening all day for myself.

Specs:
7800x3d
32gb DDR5
4070ti super 16Gb
2Tb NVME SSD

sitting on the boat on ACT 4 it’s at +10gb VRAM usage. Only way for my textures to get back to normal is to restart the game, swapping to Vulcan/DX12 does not work for me.

After restarting VRAM usage drops below 7gb

Same issue but different specs:
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D
64GB DDR5
nVidia 5090
2TB NVME
4TB NVME

As soon as I exit a map back to ziggurat refuge, all textures drop, half of them disappear. When I load a new map they come back, but then immediately disappear again. So frustrating.
This is after turning smoothing on to fix the issue of constant frame drops where my game would stutter so much it would cause crashes on the video driver, and always during boss fights.

Well glad it’s not just me. The game has now managed to get itself up to 15.6Gb VRAM usage… only difference between low end and high end GPUs is that they have more memory to feed to leak haha