If you’ve ever been annoyed by dropped frames and stutter in Path of Exile, take heart: Grinding Gear Games is still working on the problem.
“Historically, Path of Exile’s engine would drop a lot of frames (causing a bad stutter) whenever a new asset needed to be rendered but hadn’t been loaded yet,” GGG’s Chris Wilson posted last night. “So for example, you used a skill for the first time, it’d stutter for a bit while loading the relevant shaders and textures from the hard drive. We mitigated this somewhat with various preloading systems where the game starts to load assets in advance once it knows you’re about to encounter them, but it wasn’t really a perfect solution.”
The latest expansion, Echoes of the Atlas, added new texture streaming tech with the goal of maintaining at least a stable frame rate “so that you can play while loading is finishing.” According to the dev blog, even more improvements to that tech were rolled out yesterday as part of the patch. The team is continuing to work on the problem, not just for POE but for Path of Exile 2.
“While it’s acceptable for assets to briefly be drawn with blurry-textures during gameplay when they first appear (and is far better than a stall, drawing nothing, or drawing pure blackness), it’s not great at all when you load into an area and everything looks terrible for a period of time. We are trying to re-engineer stuff so that the initial loading screen covers the initial asset loading, as it should do. This should ideally mean the new system is only upside – a stable frame rate and no sustained period of terrible texture load-in for some users. We don’t have a timeline for this currently but it’s hopefully like a week or two. Rest assured that we’re going to keep working on this until it’s a good experience. In addition to the above explanation, it’s also important to understand that Texture Streaming is the backbone of an ongoing memory usage improvement project that will help make Path of Exile 2 perform well with its higher-detail assets.”
