Performance is getting worse with every patch

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

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testingthings#2158 wrote:

No. Optimize the game and stop offloading bad practices onto hardware.

True and based. This is exactly what all the "shader compilation" nonsense is appearing in more and more games. Forcing the user to generate these shaders when older games used to just load everything in a loading screen and have all the files pre-packed into the game. Now we got fancy real-time loading and people are having invisible bosses and attacks in PoE lmao

Gaming in 2026 sure is something. Shader loading was a mistake.

I don't agree on shader compilation specifically. As far as i know, compiling shaders on your hardware, for your hardware, using a good shader compiler will give you best performance. In POE issues are -
1. Amount of shaders. I believe they don't use a fixed set of base shaders that artists work with, but some sort of graph based shader editor, so every artist can create a shader specifically for their assets/effects. You end up with better artistic freedom, but insane amount of shaders for everything. They had a choice - make our artists life easier, or players experience better. They chose artists because players "can always upgrade hardware"
2. That they are compiled at runtime, and no option that im aware of to precompile them ahead of time. If they gave you an option to just leave your PC running shader compilation in background at 50% CPU for 2-3 hours, im sure most people would. Sure, it's not immediate gratification type of deal, but given the current state of the game, it's a better option.
But i think they can't do that because the engine itself can't know ahead of time what shaders exists. Im pretty sure they are packaged in asset blobs along with 3d assets, so you'd have to load these, to know which ones have shaders in them. I don't know also if the "scene" in which they are made for matters too, maybe the same asset would have to be recompiled in another "themed" lighting conditions, because it bakes some of that local scene information into the shader. Who knows, i can only guess.

However. If i had the option, to remap the textures from these custom artist crafted shaders, onto a limited set of base standard shaders, and lose the graphic "fidelity" for the sake of performance in POE, i would.
Do i need GPU particles? No. Do i need beautifully animated grass? No. I don't care. I care about the game looking A O K for the gambling/number goes up. I am paying the performance price for something i didn't ask for.

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

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testingthings#2158 wrote:

No. Optimize the game and stop offloading bad practices onto hardware.

True and based. This is exactly what all the "shader compilation" nonsense is appearing in more and more games. Forcing the user to generate these shaders when older games used to just load everything in a loading screen and have all the files pre-packed into the game. Now we got fancy real-time loading and people are having invisible bosses and attacks in PoE lmao

Gaming in 2026 sure is something. Shader loading was a mistake.

You and your aging hardware would literally have 5 minute+ loading screens. No one got time for that. Not even you.

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

Gaming in 2026 sure is something. Shader loading was a mistake.

Is PoE your first game? Shader preloading has been around for a long time, not just since 2026.
Your PC just can’t keep up with gaming in 2026.

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Celestriad#0304 wrote:

You and your aging hardware would literally have 5 minute+ loading screens. No one got time for that. Not even you.

I'm running PoE on an external USB SSD and it has like 20 second load times at most, if its a unique map its like a few seconds omegalul

That 400 mb/s speed is craaazy, its even faster than my main internal SSD with windows on it. Its just slightly faster than my other SSD, I never had 5 minute loading times because I don't run this game on Vulcan, I've always used DirectX12 lol

So nah, I'm good for now. I can keep running my alch&go maps while blocking almost all league mechanics. And the 500 GB of storage space is insane, now I can have all my games installed at the same time for the first time ever.

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testingthings#2158 wrote:

If they gave you an option to just leave your PC running shader compilation in background at 50% CPU for 2-3 hours, im sure most people would.

Oh I would do that every league, I'm tired of that shader bar being green for minutes at a time whenever there's unoptimized PoE 2 backported content like Breach "2.0" and it takes forever to load the first time, while my CPU fan is like "BRRRRRRRRRR". Its not very nice.

But I don't think GGG will ever let people pre-load shaders because they just assume their players have 5000$ PCs. Their loss, people will just quit when they can't play the game anymore lol

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

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testingthings#2158 wrote:

No. Optimize the game and stop offloading bad practices onto hardware.

True and based. This is exactly what all the "shader compilation" nonsense is appearing in more and more games. Forcing the user to generate these shaders when older games used to just load everything in a loading screen and have all the files pre-packed into the game. Now we got fancy real-time loading and people are having invisible bosses and attacks in PoE lmao

Gaming in 2026 sure is something. Shader loading was a mistake.

You can blame the GPU makers then. Shaders MUST be recompiled every time when any of the following changes:
* New gpu driver version
* New shader library version
* Graphics api changes (including minor versions)
* Game updates/changes/adds any shader using asset

and obviously

* Hardware changes (new/different gpu)


Shaders have come a long way of what they are and can do and it's basically game code at this point that needs to be compiled to the exact game version, hardware version and drivers involved you are running right now or you will get not only visual errors but also functional ones. Since nowadays many many things can only be done using these modern shaders, it's become mandatory to do so. This is not going away.

If you have shader related performance problems you should seriously do clean your shader cache and look into your gpu drivers settings pertaining to the shader cache. Almost all modern high end games use these shaders and so one game can indirectly affect another game due to the shared persistent shader cache.

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Draxinusom#3396 wrote:

You can blame the GPU makers then. Shaders MUST be recompiled every time when any of the following changes:
* New gpu driver version
* New shader library version
* Graphics api changes (including minor versions)
* Game updates/changes/adds any shader using asset

Well yeah it sucks bad. Any time there's a driver update the whole nvidia shader cache is cleared and it has to do all these CPU-heavy things all over again re-building shaders for games lmao

I have set the max shader size to 100 GB in nvidia geforce panel thingy, thankfully I don't get driver updates very often anymore so that's nice. I'm also free of the constant windows updates every month finally, since I'm still on my not-activated Windows 10.

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

But I don't think GGG will ever let people pre-load shaders because they just assume their players have 5000$ PCs. Their loss, people will just quit when they can't play the game anymore lol

They're not losing anything. Players with better hardware are more inclined to purchase mtx, they have the disposable income. It's a valid business strategy and decision. You can't turn off shadows completely or load into your hideout for that exact reason. GGG wants their game to look good, and they're succeeding. The numbers don't lie.

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Celestriad#0304 wrote:

GGG wants their game to look good, and they're succeeding.

Too bad the game looks like a blurry mess of pixels whenever I play it.

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

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Celestriad#0304 wrote:

GGG wants their game to look good, and they're succeeding.

Too bad the game looks like a blurry mess of pixels whenever I play it.

Yeah, a gtx 1550 will do that in 2026.