Textures load in excruciatingly slow

In an attempt to resolve my texture performance problems that started with 3.13, I backed up and then deleted all of the shader cache folders in my installation directory, launched the game, and then loaded into Oriath. For literally minutes (I counted the time and also took screenshots), the town is either a blue void or a barren floor as textures very, very slowly pop in.

Timelapse images (or see https://imgur.com/a/8aQqzww)


This behavior occurs for any new area I load into: My hideout, a map, the heist area, etc.

After letting the game slowly load it's assets for an area, I will point out that loading back into that area is much faster, but it still goes through the paces of void -> empty floor -> loaded. The popping in of assets is very noticeable and jarring regardless of how fast it loads, it is not a smooth or seamless process.

I am begging for some kind of official response here, please tell me this is not working as intended and that it's acknowledged as a legitimate bug. This is not "texture streaming" as I know it from other games, texture streaming doesn't mean the visual world is 95% unloaded for minutes or even seconds. There has to be some kind of baseline threshold for assets to be loaded before showing the scene to the player and the streaming of assets should not be so clunky and disorienting. I understand the goals of texture streaming as a system, but I am not willing to accept this as the cost.


My system specs:
- Windows 10
- Intel i5-6600K CPU
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 GPU
- 16 GB RAM
- PoE installed on NVMe SSD

I'm adding another album of images to demonstrate the severity of this problem. These images are from a run through the Iceberg map from start to finish.

https://imgur.com/a/Du2NokM

I've selected a few images to post here directly:

Loading into the map, patches of the floor missing for a long time


Starting the run through the map, most enemies fail to render beyond particle or bloom effects


Reached a Legion monolith, the monolith itself failing to render


At the end of the map, the portal to the Abandoned Citadel (among other things) are still not rendering.


This goes beyond inconvenience and is significantly affecting game play. If this wasn't a low tier map I would have had a much tougher time navigating the groups of invisible enemies and missing skill effects.

One more example, this is screenshot of a Ritual encounter with the cold beams that spin around in a circle. You'll notice that you can't actually see the beams, they just aren't rendering at all. Again, because this is a low tier map it wasn't a huge problem to deal with, but it would definitely be a huge risk later on and I would be very upset to die because of it.

Same problems, started with 3.13, game ran more or less perfectly in 3.12 on my rig but not since update.

I'm also having these loading problems and want this topic to reach more views!

I've had same problem since 3.13 with "improved texture streaming" launched. It seems main "improvements" of this update are abysmally slow loading of textures and almost complete lack of any kind of texture caching. Game seems to load textures every time I change instance like to a map or back to hideout/town. It also seems like game doesn't cache any textures even for things like inventory icons of common currency orbs like alteration, alchemy etc. Enemies can also be invisible after loading into a map for good 20s-30s. Likewise things like my main skills (Storm Burst/Hydrosphere) effects are mostly invisible. This makes playing very frustrating.

My PC specs:
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H
CPU: Intel Core i7 3770k (no overclocking)
GPU: Asus Strix GTX 970 DirectCU II OC 4GGB (Nvidia Geforce GTX 970)
Ram: 24GB DDR3 (1300Mhz)
SSD: Corsair MX500 1TB SATA
OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit (build 18363)

Additional info: I'm using Nvidia 461.09 drives. I'm playing PoE through Steam and I've successfully validated game files using Steam.

Here are some screenshots of how things look about 15s-20s after loading into a instance:

+1

It's not just the fact that there's invisible things in the scene that is a problem for me, but it's the insane drop of FPS as textures are being loaded that kills me even in low tier maps.

Not a lot I can do to mitigate invisible mobs at 1fps (no joke) while the game decides it wants to load in half the level.

I don't know why this change was introduced, if it was an attempt to reduce time on a load screen, honestly, I'd rather sit at the load screen longer but NOT have FPS drops due to loading while I play.

It's pretty much a golden rule of game development to minimise the amount of processing that goes on during gameplay, so this change is beyond baffling to me.

At the VERY least, it should retain common textures in memory and possibly pre-load them before even getting into a map if they're not already loaded. I.e. if you have a skill gem socketed in your gear, it's quite likely that skill is going to get fired during a play session, no need to wait until a player actually uses the skill in order to load it and if they don't swap it out in their hideout/town/next instance then they're probably still going to be using it for many maps to come.

Right now, my skills effects re-load their textures *every* new instance.

Additionally, if for some reason this change is for improved visual quality purposes (though it seems to be a load time thing to me) then it has the opposite effect, as people (like me) will just lower their settings as LOW as they possibly can in desperation to get any sort of frame rate; completely negating efforts for visual quality improvements.

If this isn't already on GGG's priority list, it really should be, it's making the game virtually unplayable.

I am also experiencing this issue. Game ran flawlessly until the most recent patch.

I have the same issue, but after like 1-5 minutes in game, it crashes, and i get the error that the display driver stopped responding then it recovered. Practically i cannot play POE, and im not sure if it is a POE thing or my VGA is about to die (I use a GTX 750 TI). This error presents itself with other games very rarely.

I'm having the same issue, and if using Vulkan (which fixed the problem) there's another problem that the game crashes, and the only way of closing it's by turning the pc off, making the game unplayable for me.

PC SPECS:

GPU - GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
CPU - Intel Core i7-7700 3.6Hz
RAM - 16 GB