Potential fix for your stutter/lag spike in game
So I built a decent PC two years ago—nothing crazy but definitely solid for gaming (64GB RAM ddr5, i9-13th gen, xt6800, Samsung SSD, etc.). I still get fps drop when play froze build but still bareable. But lately, after around 30 minutes of playing Path of Exile 2, I start getting insane stutter and lag spikes. I mean full freezes during fights, stuttering every 10 seconds, and even lag just standing in the hideout. It’s honestly becoming unplayable.
At first, I thought it was just my rig acting up. But after doing some digging, it turns out PoE2 optimization is still pretty rough. Luckily, I found a few things that helped reduce the stutter and improve performance. Hopefully, these tips help someone else too:
Fixes & Optimizations I Found:
- Global/Trade Chat Lag : The game can lag due to message spam or sync buildup in active chat channels. Use /global <random number> and /trade <random number> to switch to low/no-traffic channels. This fixs the problem above.
- Lower Channel Count: in Sound Settings Go to in-game settings and reduce the Channel Count to Low. This noticeably improved performance for me.
- Turn Off V-Sync: PoE1 had a "Predictive" desync mode, but PoE2 doesn’t. For now, turning off V-Sync reduces input lag and stutter but If you get desyncs, your best bet is to restart the game.
- Set Texture Quality to Medium: PoE2 currently doesn’t expose a texture_quality=4 setting like PoE1. “Medium” is the lowest available and can help with memory usage/stutters.
- Use Fullscreen Mode: Fullscreen provides better FPS than borderless/windowed. If you’re FPS-sensitive like me, use Fullscreen for a boost.
- Delete Shader Cache Clearing corrupted/outdated shaders can help: C:\Users\<YourName>\AppData\Roaming\Path of Exile 2\ShaderCache
- Disable Sound Settings: Manually Open: C:\Users\<YourName>\Documents\My Games\Path of Exile 2\poe2_production_Config.ini Find any sound values set 0 and change them to false.
- Mouse DPI Can Cause Lag. When I used high DPI in PoE2, the game became super laggy. Try lowering your mouse DPI or go to the game .exe → Properties > Compatibility > Change High DPI Settings
Hope this helps someone out there. Let me know if any of this worked for you—or if you’ve got other tweaks I should try
Comments
But you still have stutters ?
And let us know in few days how it goes
I personally just turned off the chat. It was the chat because im chatty and whenever i reply to it i have stutters.
I have stutters when I watch twitch on firefox on a 2nd screen, but not when I use chrome.
Bit weird, but my CPU is a bottleneck, I guess Firefox is not as optimized for twitch
Typing /clear fixes laggs for me
Turn Off V-Sync: PoE1 had a "Predictive" desync mode, but PoE2 doesn’t. For now, turning off V-Sync reduces input lag and stutter but If you get desyncs, your best bet is to restart the game.
"Predictive desync mode" is not a thing.
I'm guessing you meant either adaptive (v)sync? Or predictive networking mode?
Yes the chat has been a cause of lag/stutters ever since 0.1 release. If you experience them typing /cls into chat fixes them until the chat builds up again.
It's some bug with how it's loading chat.
Just hit f1 and watch the spike when you open and close the box.
And then when you get a message in global or trade channels.
Mostly this is an older big and simply moving channels to a random one that doesn't have a lot of people will mostly fix it.
Does anyone know how to go back to the default global chat? I joined a random /global 2345 channel
Enabling chat and joining empty chat channels completely fixed the constant stuttering for me. It blows my mind that this is even a thing, the spaghetti code must be amazing.
#1 seems to be what fixes the lag & stutters for a ton of people, including myself. Can someone with a technical background give any rhyme or reason of why loading messages by the client causes this much issues (especially CPU usage spikes)?
Does any of you get like a full disconnect but not really? Everything freezes and all the discovered map turns undiscovered… And the two gears when loading appears??
On my end, playing on Linux on a Ryzen 9 x3d, Radeon XT 7900 xtx, nvme drives, I had lots of stutter, it was a pain to play. ...until I figured that using mergerfs was a mistake since it added huuuuge lags when retrieving data from the SSD.
Now without it, and directly from ext4, the game is blazing fast.
Tl;dr: use a good SSD, and a good filesystem
I’m glad to know I’m not the only one experiencing this. My game started stuttering bad in like the last week and I have a 5080 and 9900x. Messing with the chats definitely helped but I still end up restarting my game every so often and then it’s right back to doing it again shortly after
Delete logs at game folder.
Clearing Shader Cache and setting 90% Max GPU Power Target solved my issues.
I-7700k 1080ti nvme SSD
Before I was stuttering nonstop and getting the "don't crash (gpu driver fail)" several times when in t15+ Deli waystones.
Now I can play in 4k Resolution on NVidia settings with Scaling Res set to 50% in game without the hiccups of driver failing.
EDIT: Just wanted to add that I am on NVidia Driver 576.52 released on May 19th
I get cpu spikes every 10-15 seconds even after trying all of these. Can literally watch the white line bounce with no input from me.