according to HW-Info program this is what is happening whenever i encounter the infamous framerate drops in copperlane or any of the numerous killer areas we ALL know about. whenever the game is "running fine" it is using about 30-60% on each of my 4 cores, and 40-50% of the gpu, but when i am in a heavy area the gpu climbs to 97% and the cpu usage goes way down.

i assume it means i am currently gpu-bottlenecked in poe? (i can run wasteland 2 great, btw)

i have been thinking for weeks that it is a new cpu that i need, but i guess this means it's actually gpu.

note: i use an amd radeon 7000 hd card, 2gb vram. i run the game on dx11 mode because it performs better than in dx9 mode.

for whatever reason, dx9 mode fills up the gpu usage a lot faster and in more areas than when i load the same scene but on dx11 mode. dx11 mode seems to use my quad-core better i guess.

tldr: gpu is #1 for poe, then #2 your cpu?

Define which 7000 video card you are using, and your assumptions on where the performance problem lies do seem sound.