I ABSOLUTELY FOUND A FIX to the POE2 crashes/stuttering!

Wow. It feels good to be able to ACTUALLY play the game. As of typing this, I’ve had the game running buttery smooth for 8+ hours with ZERO crashes. So, let’s get to the fix. It all comes down to the games graphics settings being unintuitive and a bit misleading, and DISCORD hooking the POE texture buffer. The fix that allowed the game to render textures and run smoothly was the Upscale Mode setting. This setting is broken! Setting it to Nis is what you have to do. Setting it to ANYTHING else causes the game to try and redownload huge texture files constantly rather than having your gpu filter textures. Setting it to Off will not work at all. Set this to Nis. This setting will allow your gpu to follow your global texture filtering setting in Nvidia control panel. I have the game render resolution set to Native.I also disabled Discord from hooking the game process. This have fixed my game completely. Like I said, I’ve had it running all night without any issues and I was crashing hourly before. The game also looks amazing now. I hope this helps some of you.

Here is proof of my frame rate stability now for anyone interested.

https://youtube.com/shorts/mH2fYXwrJxw?si=vayw10DRgUl99DQB

sorry this is bs.
what proof is this, lol?

in addition NIs is standard.
Upscalers does not cause downloading game data.

Upscaling causes downloading of game data when the render process tries to complete, but has the incorrect scale for some environment variables. The same exact file was being downloaded every few minutes in the crash log. The crash log shows it pause and unpause shader downloading when this happens. I clearly have the setting how it’s supposed to be when running native resolution. It says in this menu (which is incorrectly labeled (no upscale 5120x1440). Therefore, logic would tell you to select NO UPSCALE for your chosen upscale method. No other game has it labeled this way. In this game, no upscale completely breaks the game. It makes no sense whatsoever. Go check any other game and report back.

Upscaling != Texture Filtering.

Textures are not downloaded (implies network activity), and Upscaling has absolutely nothing to do with texture loading.

And what has Discord to do with anything here? Discord is not hooking into anything even remotely related to game texture.

You seem to fundamentally misunderstand what any of the words you used actually mean. NIS is an upscaling method itself.

If the game now works for you before crashing, that's awesome. But please don't write posts claiming you found a "fix" without researching anything about how modern game graphics rendering pipelines work.

My fps went down a little but this is much more stable. I was stuttering like crazy and it seems to be gone now. Thanks for this info.

NIS is the default.

I'm still getting crashes, this is not the root of the issue.