Path of Exile: The Fall of Oriath Performance Improvements

The latest developer announcement on the official Path of Exile forums talks about the upcoming performance improvements in The Fall of Oriath expansion. In short, the FPS loss due to the abundant particle effects Path of Exile tends to have in the lategame shouldn’t be as much of an issue now. Check out this video that showcases the improvements:

And a few paragraphs about the 3.0.0 performance goals:

3.0.0 Performance Goals

Over the last few expansions, we have significantly improved general Path of Exile performance. The game runs a lot faster now, but one of the major areas that was still not improved in 2.6.2 was worst-case performance.

Worst-case refers to the longest amount of time it takes to render a frame, as opposed to the average frame rate. Slow frames are known as “spikes”.

The major goal for 3.0.0 was to reduce the number of spikes so that the game always runs smoothly, even when there are a lot of skills being used.

In the first version of the Beta, we had already addressed quite a few places that CPU spikes were coming from.

One example of this is pathfinding. If there were a lot of enemies on screen, you would get a fast average frame rate, but would also get a lot of CPU spikes if many monsters chose to pathfind simultaneously. This is one of the many reasons why 3.0.0 Beta performance is better than 2.6.2.

3.0.0 Beta Wave 3 CPU Improvements

In Wave 3 of the Beta, we have significantly improved the speed of creating and destroying objects. This was the primary cause of spikes when using a lot of skills. We can now create thousands of skill effects per second without significantly slowing down the frame rate. Traditionally “laggy” builds should no longer be an issue.

3.0.0 Beta Wave 3 GPU Improvements

In Wave 3 we have also added a new feature called Dynamic Resolution. This is a feature that allows us to maintain high frame rates even as the amount of particles increase by decreasing the resolution of the 3d scene temporarily.

Because scenes that have a lot of particles on-screen are typically very fast-moving anyway, we have found that in practice it is fairly hard to tell that the resolution was lowered.

This solution solves any issues that players have around number of on-screen particles in intense situations without sacrificing quality in normal situations.