Once upon a time on usenet VanguardLH wrote:
What I've noticed about GPU model numbers is you want the high-end in
each range. The low-end is equivalent to mid-range in the lower
number series. Sorry, but that card makers are going to keep upping
their prices as new games come out that require the higher end cards.

The home PC that I've had since 2013 was a salvaged unit originally
dating back to 2009 (an Acer with an uberboob BIOS so no settings of
note there). I had to replace several components that got fried,
including the video card. Got an AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB for $145 on a
big discount sale. After 4 years, Newegg (where I bought the HD 7870)
is selling another for $380. Yikes.

I built this machine in 2007 / 2008 but started with a lesser CPU, 4GB of
RAM and a mechanical HDD until I could afford to upgrade. This is the third
GPU that's been in it.

I suspect you could toss $1000 USD at a new video card and you'd still
be disappointed with that game. Seems something is screwed up as your
hardware far exceeds their minimum requirements. Have you ran any
benchmarks on your setup to make sure the CPU is running at expected
clock, same for GPU, memory, SSD/HDD, etc? I've seen where a user
complained about a huge drop in performance which turned out to be the
multiplier in BIOS somehow got changed.

I have GPU-Z booting with Windows and run it with the sensors tab at the
front with "Continue refreshing while in background" ticked. It shows me the
GPU core clock, Memory clock, GPU temp, fan speed, GPU load. Memory usage
(dedicated), Memory usage (dynamic) and GPU vcore in real-time and
displaying the readings for the last three minhutes (one per second).

So yeah, the card's running as expected. When the game lags if I alt-tab to
GPU-Z the 'GPU Load' field is always pegged at 100%.

Before tossing gobs of money at a new video card, I'd go to
multibooting (but I wouldn't use Microsoft's dual-booting and instead
use a multi-boot manager, like GAG). Create a partition on the SSD
for a new instance of Windows, install a fresh copy of Windows in
that new partition, install the game in that new Windows instance,
and test the game's performance.

I'm fairly confident that the problem is the six year old mid-range card
(and the fact it's an AMD). Other people playing PoE wth the same card are
seeing the same issues since the last patch (which had quite a bit of
graphical updating as well as content).

My guest machine is a Q9550-equipped Dell Precision T3400 with an identical
SSD which also has an HD 7770 and it's performing about the same.

Note that the latest video driver may not be the best for old video
games. When I updated to later released of Catalyst, my old Thief and
other old games had problems which went away when I reverted back to
an old version of Catalyst. As I recall, I walked forward through
about 17 newer versions of the video driver and then had to back off
a few versions to find a driver that gave me the best old game
behavior and performance along with what fixes the old versions
(still newer than my original old version) gave me. The newest
driver isn't always the best for your particular setup. Newer
versions of drivers drop support for older hardware and older games
while adding new code for new hardware and hew games. Right now I
cannot move off of Catalyst v15 because going forward means I loss
all control of resetting the color and gamma with an easy menu entry
and would have to resort to manually making all the adjustments.
After The Dark Mod crashes, it leaves the colors and gamma as they
were in the game. With Catalyst v15, I just go into that tool and
reset color calibration back to Catalyst's defaults. Users have
complained that later versions dropped hardware and software options
that were convenient in the older versions.

I'm using 15.8 but don't like the 'features' one bit. I much preffered the
older interface. I've never noticed a performance drop when I've updated
drivers in the past (but decided after getting this version that I'm not
going to update again unless I absolutely have to). One thing I like about
playing PoE is that if I hit F1 I get a small overlay in the top right
showing frame time, latency and FPS so it's easy to see what's going on.

I wouldn't have come here asking advice on hardware if I wasn't sure that
was the only way to fix my issues. :-/ I'll eat dry bread and water for a
while until I can afford a GTX 1050 then see if I can hold out longer for a
1060... (I'm only half-joking, I'm disabled and have been 'living' cough
on welfare for almost a decade now.)

Cheers,
--
Shaun.

"Humans will have advanced a long, long way when religious belief has a cozy
little classification in the DSM*."
David Melville (in r.a.s.f1)
(*Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)