PoE Performance Issues still present. Need a word harsher than abysmal.
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Here we are. May 2013. Open Beta is ongoing, and Path of Exile has certainly come quite a way.
And yet, problems remain. Scroll down to the TL;DR if you do not want to read most of this. I first documented this issue in April 2012. http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/25447 That was one of the stress test weekends of PoE in its early CBT days. I received no response back then, but assumed bugs like that would be ironed out. A month later, after playing on and off a bit, I understood that things were not getting better, and spoke again. In hindsight, I was angry, because this issue has a severe effect on the enjoyability of this game, and I was frustrated. I had also not investigated the issue enough to form a properly technical assessment as to what was wrong. http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/31932 It has been 13 months, just over one year since I first became aware of this issue. The problem is still persistent. This has gone on for far too long, and no excuses can remedy this any more. The following link leads to a thread that I believe is directly related to the performance issue people are experiencing. Note that as of writing this post, the thread contains 374 posts over a span of 38 pages. That's several hundred people complaining about this issue. http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/214895 At first, I called this a minor issue. Then I pointed it out as abysmal. Now I have to concede that this whole thing has been handled with extreme negligence and complete lack of effort on the part of GGG. Now, I could be wrong, and what I am about to demonstrate does not solve the performance issues others have been experiencing, but it also very well might be the root of the problem. So at this point, you're probably sick of reading and wondering what the hell I'm talking about. Well, here it is. ===========TL;DR=========== The performance bug is thus:  As you can see here, all is well, apart from a rather disappointing maximum FPS of 77, considering the kind of hardware being used, and the resolution of the game. Still, frame time is decent, and the game runs nicely enough not to bother anybody with a typical 60Hz monitor. However, the first issue appears when global chat becomes active. Every new line of text deducts from the framerate accumulatively. Additionally, opening up sections of the interface creates even more. Pile them all up ontop of eachother, and you get the following...  At first, I dismissed it as a minor bug, as I didn't notice it most of the time back in CBT. Global chat was quiet and mostly never showed more than few lines. But as more people started playing, this problem became more apparent. As I didn't have any other internal engine tools to diagnose what the cause of this heavy performance drop was. My external hardware monitoring tools at the time revealed a heavy reliance on my AMD CPU, which, as many gamers know, aren't very good at single core performance. However, today, after playing and discovering that a bug I found over a year ago is still present, I dug down a bit more, and looked into it once again to confirm that it was not an issue with my own hardware set up. What I have discovered is the following: Root cause -When Path of Exile's engine is given strictly 2D objects to render, it does so as you would expect, but the GPU identifies the methods used as the game suddenly not performing 3D rendering any more, and switches to 2D rendering profile. Why this occurs, I do not know for sure. Drivers are set up to always prefer the default performance profile, and power settings for Windows are set so that PCIe link state is not managed at all. Yet, as soon as Path of Exile displays 2D elements, the GPU clocks down to 2D speeds and remains there until the 2D elements are no longer displayed. This causes a severe drop in performance when 2D elements are present, ultimately rendering the game almost unplayable, depending on the level of load the engine is putting on the rendering system at the time, such as skill effects, multiple player characters, and amount of 2D elements displayed. Possible related cause -Font rendering. As the problem is first displayed when Global Chat becomes populated with people, the performance reduction must be related to the methods used to display and/or alias the text in Path of Exile. This is my best guess as to where the problem lies, as it makes the most sense in general. But what does this have to do with AMD performance drops? You have an nVidia card! ATI hardware also has internal performance profiles, and arguably had them much earlier than nVidia cards, because of their power saving policies, which means that the range of ATI hardware capable of experiencing this issue is much higher, depending on how these different performance profiles are set. However, older cards from both manufacturing companies do not have these profiles at all, and work at a constant maximum factory clock regardless of settings. This means that when 2D objects are rendered, the GPU does not falsely detect a change in graphics mode, and does not switch to a lower performance mode, and Path of Exile does not slow down as it would on newer cards. Now, after all that, I must say. It is very disappointing to see this to have gone on for so long, with almost no effort to try and work with the community to figure out the cause of this issue, and having someone like me show you the root of all this after more than a dozen months of continous existence of this bug. I wager this bug has existed since alpha, even. Hundreds of people have complained, and the best GGG has done is a few posts saying 'We know the issue exists', without any explanation as to why it is happening, or what people can do to remedy it. There is no mention of this in any kind of list of known issues for people to see, nor are there any workarounds suggested in relation to it. All this lack of explanation does is fuel threads like the one I have linked above, where almost four hundred people have complained about having performance issues. Devs. You need to get priorities in order. If something has taken more than a year to fix, then somewhere, SOMETHING has gone wrong. You run a microtransaction shop already. Surely there is enough money coming in to warrant some effort to fix an issue that is crippling the game heavily? Beta is suppose to be about bugfixing, improving reliability, performance. All I've seen over the course of a year is some extra content, multiple skill balances, and a rumored lack of proper endgame balancing that is apparently a very RMT oriented perpetual wheel of map grinding. Sadly, I expect this to fall on deaf ears once again. Because who ever reads forum posts, right? Just a bunch of self entitled PC gamers who want better quality out of their video games. Discussion and confirmation from other people that the performance issue they are experience is caused by this same issue is encouraged. |
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Bravo!
You really went through a lot of trouble and assembled a rather nice post describing the exact issue i have been struggling with ever since open beta started. I hope the devs look at this post and find it in their hearts to look at the issue. The game is barely playable at it's current state. Which is a shame, because it would otherwise be a very good game.. |
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I have absolutely no idea about any of this, but as you mentioned, these video cards apparently have stored profiles for a long list of games linked to the exe files of those games.
I looked in my nvidia profiles and found that the profile associated with poe is for a dragons mmo game because teh exe files probably have teh same name. I have absolutely no idea what kind of difference that makes, but i went ahead and fixed it so poe wasn't linked to that profile anymore. people might want to try that --- I posted about it on around page 35 of that long thread. |
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Thank you so much!!!
GGG, READ THAT NOW! |
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amazing post! Totally supporting this thread!
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Out of curiosity, when you say:
" for ATI cards, are you referring to profiles found in: (Windows 7/8) \AppData\Local\ATI\ACE\Profiles If not, do you know which series introduced these profiles and where can they be found/determined? |
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" Those are not the profiles I have been talking about. The ones you speak of do not have any effect unless you change settings within them on purpose, else they are simply copies of the default configuration you've set for your machine. " Same as above, those I believe to be the custom driver settings per program. For ATI cards, the feature I'm referring to is PowerPlay. PowerPlay is a power management feature that was introduced in some ATI notebook GPUs, and has been used since the Radeon 3800 series in desktop graphics cards. So, if your card is made later than that, you may be experiencing this same issue. For nVIDIA, there is no buzzword for this feature, only a driver setting known as Power Management Mode. In my case, changing the power management setting yields no change, as it does not fully disable the other power modes. I do not know if Powerplay can be fully turned off, if it can, please try and report if it has helped at all. I will attempt to use a few more GPU tools to force my card into maximum performance mode to see if PoE is really affected by the drop in GPU speed. |
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Some mucking about in Driver settings/looking at Pstates and forcing performance modes later, and it turns out I was wrong one more time.
The switch to a lower power state from the GPU came indeed from the Adaptive Performance mode, which must have reset after a recent driver update. After setting it to full performance mode, I was no longer seeing power state switching. It remained at maximum regardless of PoE. So the conclusion is that PoE is using a plainly garbage method of displaying 2D elements, resulting in a heavily reduced usage of the GPU ( According to logs, the drop is about 10% average ) and extremely low FPS as a result, rendering the game unplayable. Shame, I was hoping this was a bug regarding power management and that it would be an easy fix, but as it turns out, the custom engine GGG uses is just coded inefficiently from the ground up. |
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I think the image below might be of interest. It's only around a minute of play but it shows a familiar pattern, for me at least. This was recorded in Warehouse Sewers.
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These are extremely odd spikes of your graphics card suddenly just dropping heavily in clock speeds for a small amount of time. It definitely should not be happening.
The interesting thing is that it is similar to thermal throttling, but your temperatures never go above 52c. |
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