55% CPU-Load at 1 FPS, bad poe code?

Hello,

i have been fondling around with the fps limiter and i tried to figure out the sweetspot between Perfomance / optics.

But i noticed i always have up to 60% CPU-load even if i limit my game to 1 FPS (foreground and background).
This looks to me like really bad coding and if others can reproduce it.
my cpu: i5 4460
my gpu: is gtx 1080

I have been playing POE sind closed beta, but this league i get up to 10 seconds screen freeze no matter the settings.

"

smon2k wrote:

Hello,

i have been fondling around with the fps limiter and i tried to figure out the sweetspot between Perfomance / optics.

But i noticed i always have up to 60% CPU-load even if i limit my game to 1 FPS (foreground and background).
This looks to me like really bad coding and if others can reproduce it.
my cpu: i5 4460
my gpu: is gtx 1080

I have been playing POE sind closed beta, but this league i get up to 10 seconds screen freeze no matter the settings.

FPS=PING relax ^) It's not your fault.

High CPU load and 1 FPS with PoE.. name me a more iconic trio

Simple to understand, your cpu is too under-powered for PoE. Lets start with the performance benchmark numbers and I'll explain:



I ran forever on an E5-1620 v2 cpu and forever suffered with shitty PoE performance. Throughout 2019 my frame-rates were going down and down and down, I was getting super bad stuttering when pack size got above a certain quantity, and in Metamorph league I was constantly frustrated by the fps crashes that the Metamorph beasts were causing.

So 2 things happened to get me from bad to great PoE QoP:

1. I upgraded to a higher core cpu (but not faster, in fact 400 MHz slower)
2. I was using Windows 7 Pro and finally got off my procrastination ass and upgraded
    to the latest Windows 10 Pro version 1909. BTW this is still a free upgrade if you
    make a Win10 v1909 flash drive using the Windows Media Creation Tool.
    (for most versions of Windows 7)

Now, since I have a Dell T3610 gaming rig I can use Intel 2011 v2 Xeon cpus so I looked at what I could use in the 1000 and 2000 Xeon series (this was start of December 2019). My choices were:

    Ivy Bridge Xeon cpu (2011 pins) 
1. Xeon E5-1650, 1660, or 1680
2. Xeon E5-2650, 2660, 2667, or 2673


All this was in early December. My BFFL knew I was interested in a more powerful cpu so for Christmas he gifted me an E5-2650 v2 cpu. Great , I get 8 cores 16 threads at 35 watts lower power. But what about the major speed hit? Ok, I tried it, PoE was much worse performance than before so back to the 1620 v2 cpu and more cpu research. Of the cpus on my short list I looked at what I could buy/afford on Ebay and pricing. This narrowed my choices down some to: E5-1650, E5-1660, E5-1680, E5-2667, and E5-2673. Of these the E5-1660, E5-1680, and E5-2673 were not a good price/performance value (January 2020 Ebay). Ok so a 6 core cpu or an 8 core cpu at a slower raw speed (200 MHz) and more cost (approx $50 USD more). Since my E5-1620 is rated at only 6631 PassMark score the E5-1650 is 8836 compared to the E5-2667 at 13737 I decided the extra cores at a slower speed would be the best and bought it. Plugged it in, booted up Windows 7, crossed my fingers, fired up PoE, and ran a yellow map. Drat and f'ck, no change at all and the speed drop made the stuttering worse. I was thinking "GD GGG and their horrible home rolled game engine". But wait... I'm still using a 9 year old OS and it's now EOL by Microsoft. Ok, time to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro. After that I crossed my fingers again and fired up PoE. Hmm... PoE started up faster, picked a character... WOW!, that was a fast load in (1 sec. vs. 4 on Win7), and went to my hideout to run a map. WTF!!!... (jaw drop) as the mini-stats showed I was pegged at 200 fps in my hideout.
Ran a yellow map and all was smooth with super high frame-rates all the way. Ran another twin boss map and found Alva and did the 3 temple runs with perfect fps (all above 100 fps and most of the time well above 150 fps). The twin boss fight was perfect too, 0 fps lags or stuttering.

---

TLDR: So what the hell was my old Win 7 doing to foobar PoE thread scheduling and kill fps that Windows 10 doesn't cause. That I'll never know but now PoE is working perfectly (night/day improvement) like I could never have imagined.

So what does all this mean to you. First, I believe that the days of running PoE on a 4 core cpu are over forever. GGG put this in the 3.10 patch notes:

"

• Improved engine multi-threading, and added support for 16 logical cores (previously 8), meaning Path of Exile can better utilize high-end CPUs now.

GGG is tuning PoE for optimizing for 8 core cpus with hyper-threading and by doing so is foobar-ing thread timing on 4 core cpus. If PoE is trying to run more code threads than the cpu physically has then Windows will be doing a lot of processor state saves and reloads to swap code threads among the physical processor cores and that's very time consuming and will definitely kill your framerate.

Secondly, I believe that we must have a cpu with ≥ 10 K Passmark score as a minimum in order to get above the cpu performance threshold to not have stuttering and fps crashing.

I was concerned over what the 400 MHz drop in speed going from a 4 core cpu to an 8 core cpu would do in PoE but my fears were unfounded and to my great surprise I now know we need more physical cores/threads to keep PoE from performance crashing. I'm only running with a Geforce 1060 AMP! gpu so PoE doesn't need a 2000 series Nvidia gpu to play well.

Important Note:
With the latest PoE patch 3.10.0 GGG foobar-ed something and timing is f'cked so frame-rates are bad again. GGG will hopefully fix that quickly. Hmm... this morning (3-23) I see patch 3.10.0f might be the fix:

"

Kieren_GGG wrote:

3.10.0f Patch Notes:

• Limited shader uploads to avoid overloading the graphics driver. Additionally, please make sure that Shader Cache is enabled in your Nvidia or AMD graphics control panel settings.

This patch was a restartless deploy on the servers, you will need to restart your client to receive the client changes.

"

Arrowneous wrote:

TLDR: So what the hell was my old Win 7 doing to foobar PoE thread scheduling and kill fps that Windows 10 doesn't cause.

Important Note:
With the latest PoE patch 3.10.0 GGG foobar-ed something and timing is off again so frame-rates are bad again. GGG will hopefully fix that. Hmm... this morning (3-23) I see patch 3.10.0f might be the fix:

My PC is fubar because of the latest 23/3/2020 hotfix.

Note: fubar - stands for "f***ed up beyond all recognition".

"

SpontaneousCombustion wrote:

"

Arrowneous wrote:

TLDR: So what the hell was my old Win 7 doing to foobar PoE thread scheduling and kill fps that Windows 10 doesn't cause.

Important Note:
With the latest PoE patch 3.10.0 GGG foobar-ed something and timing is off again so frame-rates are bad again. GGG will hopefully fix that. Hmm... this morning (3-23) I see patch 3.10.0f might be the fix:

My PC is fubar because of the latest 23/3/2020 hotfix.

Note: fubar - stands for "f***ed up beyond all recognition".

I haven't played PoE (I hate Delirium) since the hotfixes and only saw this morning's patch note. That's shit if GGG hasn't found a solution yet.

You're right, I should be using fubar instead of foobar as PoE is the worst game of all time on performance I've ever played (and I've been running Windows since 3.0 and have played all the major arpgs) so fubar would be a better way to describe PoE's bad QoP. In fact, it wasn't until I plyed PoE that I ever had any concerns about framerates.

Let us not forget SNAFU.

**Situation Normal, All F**ked Up**