Defensive Mindweb absolutely cripples my framerate

[omgFIREBALLS]

I can't recall what my graphics were set to originally, but dragging the slider all the way to the left did not solve the issue. For that matter, I didn't really notice the graphics getting worse either...

 

Anyway, as the topic says, this lovely spell makes my game extremely slow, and that's going from smooth. I've searched for the issue several times, thinking I can't be alone, but all the searching has made me feel very alone. So take my DxDiag and work your magic.

DxDiag.txt

[Radamanthe]

There's something very wrong in the engine regarding performance when some spells are used (by player or NPCs). I have a very good rig (Intel i5, GTX 980 Ti is enough for anything with full details) and very good performance overall, but there are some rare spell effects which put it down to its knees (dropping from ~60 fps to barelly 5 fps). It has always been like that since I play PoE. Especially noticeable when you happen to pause the action while one of these effects is active (obviously a rendering issue as the pause does not stop rendering each frame).

 

I have very little hope now about it being fixed though...

Edited March 15, 2016 by Radamanthe

[omgFIREBALLS]

I may have misjudged the situation. Let's put it like this. At times, the game slows down significantly, putting my framerate at "pretty damn low", but not "absolutely crippled". If I at this point close PoE and play another game, that game is also affected. A reboot fixes it (I haven't known anything else to work), but I don't know why it happens to begin with... I'm thinking tabbing out has something to do with it. Anyway, when the game is slow in this way, Defensive Mindweb becomes the coup de gras. If this hasn't happened, then the spell doesn't affect my framerate at all.

 

So DM is not really to blame, but I can't get really get very specific about what is.

[Radamanthe]

Anyway I stand my point. There is definitely something wrong on the gfx side:

 

• Unrelated to alt-tabbing.
• Unrelated to other running games (I never run several games at a time, only one, always). What you just described is natural: if the graphic system is stressed in a game, it is likely that some stress will continue if you swap to another game using that graphic system, at least for some time (may be the time required for the underlying system to swap datas between GPU's and CPU's memories, which can itself be a slow process... it depends on many things on PCs).
• As I said, it's quite infrequent. It is specific to some spells (I did not identify it, but I will provide the information if I do), and I mainly noticed it for spells used by NPCs (which may not have equivalent on the player side). All I can assert for now is that these spells have a very shinny/glowing effect. If you pause during the effect, the FPS dramatically drops (as the graphic engine still fully operates during pause). Once you unpause and the spell effect fades out, everything becomes smooth again.

Once I identify it clearly, I will create another thread about it to make sure devs notice it. I highly suspect that some shinning/glowing effects have been done with a far too high number of overlapped transparent polygons, or something like that. As a game developer myself, I can say it looks like that kind of issue.

Edited March 19, 2016 by Radamanthe