Water causing lag and graphical glitches

Can reproduce the issue on demand with any area that has a large body of water. First noticed in the Lush hideout, but also experienced in Oriath Square when crossing the bridges.

Gpu sits at 38% while standing in an area without water, with water it spikes up to 100%

dropping water detail to low fixes the issue, but I have always been able to run at High detail for water until today (even yesterday there was not an issue)


System Specs:
OS - Windows 10 Home OS Build 1803 Version 17134.799
Processor - AMD FX 8350
GPU - GTX 970
RAM - 32GB DDR3

So even my work around is not helping for the Brine king fight. drops even lower frames then before and the screen goes into single digit fps.

so far no setting changes have made a difference

My computer has no difficulty with any other game, so I can confirm my GPU is working just fine.

I have a similar problem where being near water causes the FPS to drop below 1.
It is by far the worst near the waterfall by the end of Mud Flats and battles with act 6 and act 9 bosses.

The problem only occurs in the 'windowed fullscreen' mode and only if the game's resolution does not match the desktop resolution.
After setting both resolutions to match OR using 'fullscreen' I have experienced no performance issues near bodies of water.

Lastly, the problem only appeared after updating to Legion, I had no problems with water under any settings in the previous league.
Hope this helps!

Experiencing a similar issue in my coastal hideout.

Running borderless windowed mode at 1440p.
This matches the resolution of the display the game runs on, but I have 2 monitors.

I've already tried deleting the shader cache.
Running fullscreen mode is not an option as I'd no longer be able to interact with my second screen.

So trying full screen mode seems to have gotten me passed brine king, though full screen wouldn't fill up the entire screen for some reason, but that's not really all that relavent to this issue.

So the issue is with water, in Windowed or Windowed Fullscreen mode

confirming this is accurate for me as well

Same issue for me. Waterfall in mud flats and the brine king encounter both can crash. Brine king is where I'm at and I'm afraid I won't be able to progress at all at this point. Whatever was done to water effects is absolutely murdering performance, had zero problems last league in either area.

I had the issue but somehow I managed to fix it. I'm not sure what exactly helped so I'll just explain everything I did.

So before Legion I had older GPU (GTX 660 Ti) and I used to run the game in lower resolution (1680x1050) and in Full Screen Windowed mode. I bought GTX 1660 a while ago but didn't play PoE with it before Legion and forgot to switch resolution.

So at release Water Detail Level High caused massive FPS drops and was practically unplayable. Switched it to low and it was decent but still some micro stutter that wasn't supposed to be there around water.

Today after reading that switching to Full Screen could help I decided to give it a go. I also noticed the resolution then and went to native 1920x1080 at the same time. First I tried Full Screen and the issue was gone. Then Windowed and no issue. For the sake of it I decided to try Full Screen Windowed again and to my surprise the issue was gone from there too.

So no more FPS drops due to water for me but I'm not exactly sure why.

+1 to this bug, was playing at 1050p borderless window mode and my fps tanked to a whole 2 fps during the Brine King fight (and Mud Flats).
After switching to Full-Screen I was back at 100~ FPS.

Confirming I have the same issue (bug report #631,345,642) - I can provide dxdiag save output as necessary, or help with testing.