To Everyone Having FPS Spikes Since Patch 0.11.5

Let me just start off by saying that I don't mean to get your hopes up, but, I do hope that we can figure out the cause on your end, as I did for myself.

I've been having these issues in PoE myself, ever since I patched. The game was beyond playable since 0.11.5 and getting rather frustrating, since there were no problems like this in any of the prior versions.

After a little troubleshooting I seem to have eliminated the cause for myself, without uninstalling/reinstalling anything. Unfortunately, I made several changes at once, rather than incrementally, so I need your help figuring out what the specific cause was.


To test it out (and push my luck), I just entered an MF party with 3 incinerate totems and 2 spork totems in an indoor map and despite the frame spiking (which has always happened prior to 0.11.5), it was absolutely playable with my Flicker Shadow, even while spamming LS myself.

This is HUGE progress from yesterday, when I was unable to play in a regular melee party without cowering behind others for protection and shift+clicking Frenzy during those split second freezes, hoping I'd still be alive. (sound familiar?)
In other words, I was able to KICK ASS again since the patch!



The following are the symptoms I was experiencing:
1. FPS stuttering for no apparent reason, running through lunaris and encountering mob packs was enough to freeze the screen and drop FPS to below 5
2. Playing in MF parties was unbearable, every loot explosion would spike the FPS down to 0.
3. Initially entering a map with a full party and using skills for the first time or encountering mobs for the first time would result in FPS spikes
4. Standing in Sarn and just having random FPS spikes based on other players entering Sarn.

I hope the conditions above apply to you and we can find the solution again; otherwise, try anyways and see if it improves your frame spiking.

Rather than listing out all of the changes I made to eliminate this, I will take it one step at a time so we can (hopefully) isolate the issue.



Possible Solution #1: The "..\Path of Exile\ShaderCache" folder is massive, mine had over One hundred and fifty thousand files (which took a long time to delete). My assumption is that the stutters during spell casting/mobs dying may be caused by the client trying to access/write/sort through this massive folder. Delete it, let the client remake them and report back after some testing.

EDIT: I can confirm this is the cause on my end, after about 20 maps or so, my ShaderCache folder started to fill up to around 10k files and the fps spiking returned, deleting it again made the spiking disappear. I really hope this temporary solution works for the rest of you as well, at least until GGG is able to look into it and find a solution.

Just install a ram-disk and hardlink the shadercache to that drive. PPL with SSDs should do that (and hardlinking other cache/temp dirs) anyway to avoid writes to ssd drive.

Everytime you restart ur system the shadercache is deletedand a new instance of that directory created.

wow, i hope this works, deleted 29,285 files
going to try now.


if this is what is causing it, omfg GGG get head out of ass plz kthx :)

will re: edit: with update if this works for me too...

EDIT: while I did see a small visible improvement (111FPS in town with 10+ people, steady ++ 65FPS in docks with 2 group members, idle) --- this still didnt fix it for me.
i just played with a discharger for example, and everytime he discharges, i stutter for 0.5 seconds (client total lockup).
also, while just running from one end of the map to the other, my FPS meter looks like a heartattack.
severely spiking up and down. not a smooth line at all. and this is the same way its been for quite awhile now.

maybe GGG hasnt heard of precache?
are you guys not using VRAM effectively?
what the heck can possibly be causing such massive video performance spikes all the time?

still /frustrated and giving up on this game (again) for awhile...

I have the same problem.
Just 'upgraded' my GTX550Ti to a HD7850 2G.
Totally disappointed!!!!!!!!!!
GGG please fix this.
I am playing a dominating blow facebreaker. Every time I splash DB the screen freezes for a split second. This didn't happen on my old nvidia card.
In a party in docks, the system just froze and hung my PC.

Something must be done.