Global Illumination and Point Light Shadows Preview

It almost brings a tear to my eye, watching how rapidly GGG's graphics programmers mature.

They've most certainly come a long way in just like 5-ish years, from programming stuff the way it'd been since practically the 90s, to mastering a lot of the latest and greatest techniques.

This is also why they keep managing to improve the visuals while ALSO improving performance: the balance you get is a function of the programmer's skill, and in just a span of months, this is a programming team that has lapped their old selves and then some.

Congratulations to Alex and everyone else working on the game's graphics for a job well-done!

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kilgoretroutjr wrote:

at the present time my gpu will not support dx11.
what is the lowest cost and units for a power supply? and nvidia gpu necessary to see all the wonderful items poe will have? is the gpu in the $400us or $120us range?

please keep in mind us users of less than optimum tech.

thank you for the interest

Keep in mind that ESPECIALLY with the various new algorithms, the primary (close to only) setting that dictates the amount of GPU you need will be the resolution you run the game at.

For reference, I play the game on a (now kinda dated) GTX 750, which is sufficient to run at 1280x768 with maxed settings, and get a constant 60 fps outside of a few particular situations. (usually reliant on stacked ground effects; e.g, Arachnid Tombs with both Elder influence and chilled ground; ENEMY activity doesn't reduce the FPS)

If your CPU is absolutely ancient (>10 years old) I might consider a new PC. Barring that, You should still be able to enjoy just about everything PoE offers... Just lower the resolution. your resolution makes a bigger difference than any other setting.

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Daiena wrote:

These days games will either bottleneck on GPU or CPU, a.k.a. you cannot have one on the high range and the other on low.

Actually, a game will always be bottlenecked by SOMETHING, provided it isn't being limited through Vsync. (where the "bottleneck" there shifts to just being your display's refresh rate; this is what a "constant 60 fps" means, since the most common refresh rate is 60 Hz)

As far as pairing mismatched GPUs and CPUs, you actually can most certainly do that, but it depends on the game. Path of Exile has tended to be a VERY CPU-heavy game, so I'm using a relatively cheap GPU with a Core i7. The GPU rarely hits anywhere near 100% load while playing, indicating that it's overkill. Of course, I'm usually Vsync-limited, but my CPU and GPU usage are usually in small percentages for this.

On the other hand, I could load up most FPS games, and my CPU usage will be -lower-, but my GPU usage will be capped out, and I often won't get 60 FPS.

Makes me think an Aura bot with scorching ray is a good option for party play.


My computer is ready to eat with these graphical improvements.

It's toooo dark. :-(

Looks pretty good ! Thx ggg for improve our game experiences.

Reminds me of how the shadows worked in the game Nox way back when, although it had the crazy/cool effect of totally blacking out anything not within your character's line of sight: https://youtu.be/LlEKu-iK10U?t=4m5s. I'll be using these new shadow options for sure.

Performance-wise, using MSI Afterburner to monitor, my findings have been that PoE is often barely using available CPU/GPU resources, even though I'll have lots of those times where the FPS drops super low. Reminds me of how TF2 got on the Source engine when they didn't optimize all the MTX hats and effects with proper LOD: you'd turn a corner and suddenly tank your FPS, only to have it immediately bounce back up into the 100s.

When Incursion started, I pretty fast realised that i had to buy more ram to play without crashes... What should i buy now for delve?

Being a designer i can't tell you how much this will improve the experience.

My Vega 64 will jump of joy!

Get a serious card..

All about that immersion

Well spent money GGG/Tencent