Do you save your games to your PC or an external SSD? Loading Screen/FPS Performance change!

I always save my Steam games on an external drive to free up space on my PC (I use it for work and pretty much everything, and it lets me take my collection to another device if I need to). Normally this is not a performance changer for me. Today I moved everything from my external drive onto my PC (Windows C:) and it made a night and day difference for me. I've never needed to do this for my other games (mostly graphics intensive MMORPGs), but it made a big improvement in my PoE 2 experience.

My loading screens were several minutes long and it took about as long to open the game, now it only takes several seconds. Big help for me.

THANK YOU!

Just to clarify...

Do you mean "local drive" is a NVMe type storage? Because otherwise it wouldn't make any sense apart from different models of SSD with varying performance when short read bursts are performed, which is very likely the issue on games that frequently load data from the disk into memory.

I always tend to put the most frequently played games on NVMe and the ones that are "archived" onto the much slower SSDs.

I think you got some terms mixed up.PC = personal computer. That includes cabinet and everything in it including hard disks/storage devices(like SSD), cpu, gpu, motherboard, memory etc etc. So "on your pc or an SSD" makes zero sense. Noone sane would ever use an external drive or external SSD for serious gaming. It would be waaaay slower than most internal options.

If you can, use a separate NVMe/M.2 for operating system and the game you play. If you only have access to one then it is fine to use it on the same but not optimal. Try to always a good chunk of space left on your storage device or it might slow down drastically(I generally try to never go fill it up more than 60-75%-ish depending on base storage capacity. Make sure to read up on what type of SSDs your motherboard can support before buying though.

Running PoE on a normal HDD would feel miserable.