My fight against micro (or macro) freezes

If you are having the same issue with an ATI card check this global ATI thread : http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/142392

Even more global thread but not ATI oriented : http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/83984

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Hello,

I'm a HC level 41 duelist and things are starting to get serious for me :3

I'll die, like any of you (haha), but i want to die in the right scenario, desync, bad skill, crash, nothing that i can control...

But when it's about my game freezing for 0.5, 1, 4 or more seconds i don't feel comfortable playing and i know i can try to fix that stuff on my side.

Symptoms :

My freezing problem generally appears at least when meeting mobs for the first time and then in other situations that i can't really explain. I feel like i can generally say when i'm going to meet a mob pack soon when i'm freezing while there's actually nothing happening in the screen.
When i'm in group bashing a lot of mobs it happens a lot more obviously.


While the geforce is having low fps, it remains consistent. The radeon has big fps spikes causing ingame freezes.

Blabla :

I've started yesterday to look on how to upgrade my PC without spending much, and while i'd like to reach a i5 and a Radeon HD 7850 (not sure about ATI though since it seems to have low fps issues in some cases with POE) the cheapest would be to improve the proc from my motherboard to a Phenom X6 with that very graphic card. Problem is that i'm not sure it will improve my situation.

Hence comes the HDD case, i read that some people have the same issue (i'm not only talking about the skeleton freeze here) and that it would be related to assets loading from hdd.

Subsidiary question : How are the assets actually loaded into memory ? I guess that everything is pushed when the map is loaded but then why the freezes, is that a graphic card MEMORY issue ?

Here is my dilemma, am i analyzing the situation right ? I've been lurking on SSDs for some time now but the cheapest would even be to buy more ram and make a ramdisk, if that's actually related to the problem...

Specs :

MB : GA-MA78LMT-S2
Proc : AMD Athlon II X3 440
Graphic card : Radeon HD 4850 1GB
Memory : 2x2GB Kingston/Corsair
HDD : Hitachi HDS72105
O/S : Win7 64 bits

DxDiag : http://pastebin.com/1zKkRXu7

Graphic card :



Monitored datas while playing :




What i've tried :

* Game on USB stick
* Different graphic drivers : windows drivers, the latest ati drivers (13.1) and 3 other versions
* Played with Catalyst sliders and force performance over quality
* Underclocking/Overclocking the card
* 800*600 & everything on low
* vsync on/off
* -gc1 -gc2
* --nosound
* Windowed/Fullscreen
* A different graphic card, Geforce 8800GT 512MB, no freezes anymore

What i haven't tried :

* Ramdisk
* SSD

Notes :
* This is not a *flat* FPS issue, i'm having 60 fps when things are ok but in some situations it's getting as low as ~0fps
* My PC has been formatted 2 days ago, my PC is clean
* I'm closing everything when testing and i don't have any weird service running
* Lightning Strike & Dual Strike are my two main skills

Related topics :

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/83984
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/29234
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/61635
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/65141
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/142392
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/126058

List of ati cards players having the same issue (according to them) :

4200
4800 i7 2600k 3.4ghz
4850 Win7 64 bits
5150
5400
5650
5700 i7 / 8gb ram, win7 64 bits ultimate
5750
5850
5870 i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz / 16gb ram / Win7 64 bits Ultimate
6670
6850 OC
7850
7870 i7-3770k / 16gb ram / Win7 64 / SSD
7970

Update : I tried with a Geforce 8800GT 512MB which seems to be in the same performance category than mine and it doesn't freeze anymore !

I had the latests ATI drivers before formatting and i now have the windows driver of a fresh win7 install. I'm going to try some other drivers and if that still doesn't work i'll look into some cheap graphic cards.

Ha, so the game really does have some issue with ATI. I don't have as much problems as you but I do have some with my ATI HD5850

Similar issues myself, mainly happens when new models/textures load. For example, the first time in a play session i pop down a totem, i get a second of freeze that is clearly client side as opposed to the server de-sync issue.


My video card isn't amazing, but it's good enough (Sapphire 6950 2 gig) that i'm pretty sure it's just bad code/compatibility with ATI. Which is hopeful, because it means they should be able to fix it.

I get the same loading issue on an NVidia card: EVGA Gtx 560. Whenever I encounter a new mob type or summon a skele/zombie the first time in a play session, I get the freeze.

Thanks for the feedbacks guys.

I've tried 3 different driver versions, played with the catalyst sliders, overclocked/underclocked my graphic card and still the same issue.

I'm now looking for a new graphic card, i was going blindly for nvidia but when i see the littlextiger post i'm a bit scared. I know there's a topic of the "working specs for poe" on the forum, i will take a look at it.

Here is the difference between the two graphic cards :



Even though the geforce has lower fps in that situation it's way more consistent than the radeon where each spike corresponds to a freeze.

Try getting a solid state drive. It's the loading of the textures for the first time that causes the freeze.

Alright but why the geforce would solve the problem then (if that's indeed a drive issue) ?

Hey, look here if you have enough RAM !

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/108231

I have three systems, one with a fast SSD and an ATI graphics card, the others with slow HDDs and Nvidia cards. Guess which system hesitates on and off during combat. I think ATI drivers don't play nicely with PoE (in some cases? I've not heard from anyone that their ATI card *is* playing the game perfectly, but hey, maybe there is someone.).