[POTENTIAL FIX] for CPU spikes / fps drops

Now that I couldn't play the second league and it's getting on my nerves that I can play all other games except my favorite game, here's a solution that might help other players who had a similar problem as me.

My system:
Intel i7 4790k
16GB Ram
6650XT
SSD 500MB/s

My problem was:
With multithreading on, my CPU and FPS jumped up and down, it was unstable and unplayable. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQDX3KeuBbQ)

After searching for several hours for troubleshooting, I noticed that when playing a YouTube video in the background, my FPS stabilized.

That could only mean one thing: CPU C states! It seems that Path of Exile's engine doesn't handle these states correctly.

What are CPU C-States?
There are various power modes of the CPU which are determined on the basis of their current usage and are collectively called “C-states” or “C-modes.”
Each state of the CPU utilises different amount of power and impacts the application performance differently.

This has no place in gaming computers imo!

Troubleshooting:
There are two settings in the BIOS that helped me to get the problem under control to some extent.
EIST (Enhanced Intel StepSpeep Technology) = OFF
CPU C states = OFF

Now: Stable 60 fps, settings below.



Try it out and cheer on your result.

Best regards

Not recommended coz it causes power usage to go up and wears out CPU.
It should be fixed by GGG, not by user tinkering with system settings, bios, registry or 3rd party software.
Also it was posted few times already here and on reddit.

"

gorioo wrote:

Not recommended coz it causes power usage to go up and wears out CPU.

don't mix up overclocking with c-states. power consumption doesn't go up in my case since I use this machine for gaming only.

"

gorioo wrote:

It should be fixed by GGG, not by user tinkering with system settings, bios, registry or 3rd party software.

soon

"

AintCare wrote:

edit: also nothing makes you look like a pro like specifying your Sata3 SSD speed

imagine flexing with generic ssd.

"

Starguest wrote:

"

gorioo wrote:

Not recommended coz it causes power usage to go up and wears out CPU.

don't mix up overclocking with c-states. power consumption doesn't go up in my case since I use this machine for gaming only.

c-states makes cpu to save energy, turning them off will cause higher power consumption.

"

Starguest wrote:

soon

tm :)

Hi, I've noticed that we both experience the same issues with our i7 CPUs.

I'm just going to copy-paste what I wrote in another thread; I don't seem to have access to BIOS options that you do (namely, EIST). Do you have any other advice on what to look for/at? Thanks!



Maybe it's worthy to mention, but just out of safety I'm running the game with most of GPU intensive stuff set to Off or Low (Lighting, Shadows, Anti-aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering etc.) despite the fact my GPU is more than enough to run at medium-high settings.
I dunno if this could also affect my performance.










copy-paste thing I mentioned is just below

I've also been having issues with really bad performance, overheating, throttling and all that jazz ever since 3.22 released. For reference sake, I played non-stop last 2 weeks of 3.21 and reached T16 maps with absolutely zero, nada, nill issues on the very same specifications and settings that I was using for 3.22



Running on W11
i7-13700H 2.40 GHz
16 GB DDR4@3200MHz
1TBish SSD
Nvidia Geforce RTX 4050 (laptop ver.)

For reference, I'm on an ASUS Vivobook P15 which comes with its own set of quirks (and bull), mainly to do with their on-board bloat/software. This might explain some of the following issues.

For me, even running to Act 3 was a trial of patience and frustration due to my PC going into hybernation from sheer overheating, going up to 95°C at times. After trying to figure out what exactly ASUS means by "performance" and "balanced" mode, I've found a setup that doesn't send my PC into hibernate every 2 minutes.

However, this has lead to my CPU starting to throttle under a certain load. Framerate drops down to singular frames (5 fps), and it becomes practically unplayable for a short while.

I haven't been quite able to get to the bottom of the problem;
so far, I've tried changing the following settings, with their impact listed:

Resolution - very little positive to no impact
V Sync - disabling made a big impact on framerate stability while under low to medium load
Rendering - Vulkan seems to run the best
3x - 2x buffering - no noticeable impact
Capping the framerate (with Vsync off) - positive impact, slowing down the overheating to an extent
Hyper-threading - disabling it had a negative impact (go figure, was worth a try though)



Here's an example of my CPU beginning to throttle, this would always be accompanied by the framerate dipping into single digits.