Ultimate Path of Exile 2 Performance Fix (2025) | Updated 24.01.2025

Welcome.

UPDATED 24.01.2025

This guide is designed to help you troubleshoot and resolve CPU and NVIDIA GPU-related issues in Path of Exile 2. It primarily focuses on addressing problems with rendering, loading shaders, and Resizable BAR (rBAR), which are known to cause low FPS, stuttering, crashes, and hangs.

Please follow the complete guide to tackle the issue from multiple angles for the best results.


Note: If you are using an AMD CPU and AMD GPU, you can still benefit from using the "PoEUncrasher" tool and deleting the shader folders. In this case, you can skip the remaining steps of this guide.

GUIDE

1. Close PoE2

2. Delete ALL "ShaderCache" folders from your PoE2 Appdata folder AppData\Roaming\Path of Exile

• Open a folder.
  
• Type %Appdata% in the search bar/field and hit Enter.
  
• Navigate to the folder mentioned above.
  
• Delete all folders with the name "ShaderCache".

3. Open NVIDIA Control Panel:

• Manage 3D Settings:
  
• Change "Shader Cache Size" to 100GB (It will not take this much space, don’t worry).
  
• Change "Power Management Mode" to Maximum Performance.
  
• Change "Texture Filtering Quality" to High Performance.

4. Open Windows Graphics Settings (System -> Display -> Graphics):

• Choose "Add an App" (Browse).
  
• Add PathOfExile, PathOfExile.exe, and PathOfExile_x64 from the Path of Exile 2 installation folder.
  
• Click on each app you added, then choose "Options" and set it to "High Performance".

You can now start your game and test out the changes. You should notice that the first load of your hideout takes a couple of seconds longer the first time, and when you load a map, you’ll see on the in-game performance graph that "Shader" will spike initially. Once it stabilizes, your game should run smoothly.

NOTE: IF YOU STILL HAVE ISSUES OR WANT TO FIX THE PROBLEM FURTHER, CONTINUE WITH THESE ADVANCED STEPS

NOTE:

NvidiaProfileInspector is a 100% legal software that allows you to change values in the NVIDIA driver and is fully compatible and safe for all games. The following solution is specific to PoE2. For other games, refer to relevant guides.

5. Download NvidiaProfileInspector:

• Download it from https://github.com/Orbmu2k/nvidiaProfileInspector/releases.
  
• Extract the files into a new folder wherever you want and run the program in Admin mode by right-clicking "nvidiaProfileInspector.exe" and selecting "Run as Administrator".

6. Change the Profile on the top of the program to "Path Of Exile 2":

• Click in the field, type "Path," and choose from the dropdown list.

NOTE:

If you do NOT see the rBAR options listed below, you might have an older GPU that does not support this feature.

7. Change the rBAR values:

• rBAR Feature -> Enabled
  
• rBAR Options -> 0x00000001
  
• rBAR Size Limit -> 0x0000000100000000
  
• Click "Apply Changes" twice in the top-right corner.

8. Fix NVIDIA profiles issues with PoE2 being mistaked for PoE1:

For some players they have a issue where launching PoE2 from Steam actually loads the driver profile from Nvidia for PoE1 which causes stutter/lag during rendering and beginning of maps.

• Open Nvidia Profile Inspector
  
• Drag "PathOfExileSteam.exe" from the PoE2 installation folder into the NvidiaProfileInspector window. If it says Path Of Exile in the list you have an issue and if it says Path Of Exile 2 you can skip the rest of this guide.
  
• Click on "Remove Application from list" Icon in the Top Middle and remove the items in this list.
  
• Now Chose "Path Of Exile 2" from the drop down list and click the "Add application to current profile" button in the Top Middle and add "PathOfExileSteam.exe" from the installation folder.
  
• Click "Apply Changes" twice in the top-right corner.

NOTE:

If you are playing BOTH PoE1 and PoE2 you need to make sure the correct Nvidia Profile is being used. I can recommend the following video to help you with this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxK9j1GU-gw

SOLVING POE2 CRASH ISSUES

Download "PoEUncrasher":


Follow the link and download the latest version. Read the information on the site about how to run this program. https://github.com/Kapps/PoEUncrasher?tab=readme-ov-file

Essentially, it adjusts the CPU affinity during heavy game load to mitigate crashes. This solved 95% of all my crash issues.


Hope this helps! <3

[murri]

/clear

It helps enormously to run /clear regularly. The fps drops over time and this is actually due to the accumulated chat messages, kinda weird tbh.
Im dropping from 150 to 100 in my hideout in like 30 min.

[ArchieTheGreat]

AMD pls

[Quen_ZA]

can also add steam settings/downloads and then disable pre caching shader function as a possible fix, my frame times are now extremely consistent with dx 12, vulkan still randomly gets stuck on low fps unfortunately


Intel I5 2400
RTX 2070
16 gb RAM
Windows 10 64 bit

[STROY]

ГГГ не собираются решать проблему похоже. Придется удалять игру и ждать когда исправят.

[⋆｡‧˚ʚ guaaaaa]

thanks

[12ms]

UPDATED WITH A NEW SECTION TODAY IN REFERENCE TO Yarrly`s comment below.

Thanks for the tip.

[ExoticBomj]

it became WORSE

[CrazySpb]

@samogon я чат отключил и все стало прекрасно
I turned off the chat and everything became fine

[samogon]

помогает только через бантик запускать , и то вчера вечером фреймы прыгали ( сегодня норм ))

[Yarrly]

This guide helped a lot https://youtu.be/KxK9j1GU-gw?si=gWgYUnI6qlNwIPfC