Our programmers have completed another wave of game client performance improvements. We plan to release them next week in a minor update called 2.5.2. Today's news post explains how these changes improve Path of Exile's performance.

Much of the work that the game client performs each frame is rendering the scene. Under DirectX 9, it was not possible to spread this work out over multiple threads that run on different CPU cores. One of the big advantages of the DirectX 11 renderer is that we are now able to multi-thread the renderer code itself. Previous performance updates have multi-threaded other aspects of the client (such as particles or the action simulation system), but the 2.5.2 release next week multi-threads the actual scene rendering.

These further performance gains are only relevant if you were previously CPU-bound. If you're bottlenecked by the speed of your graphics card, then they don't improve your performance. On our test machines, the DirectX 11 renderer with shadows on "Low" settings is now faster than the DirectX 9 renderer with shadows off (which was always our target).

This is a major step forward and we hope to continue to deliver more improvements in the future as the optimisation continues.