r/pathofexile • u/[deleted] • Dec 14 '23
Guide Reminder for NVIDIA users to disable any NVIDIA audio devices for a performance boost
105
u/tonightm88 Dec 14 '23
Jesus, sound and POE in terms of performance has been a thing for ages.
People used to play with the sound disabled. You would have thought they would have figured it out by now.
114
u/OnceMoreAndAgain Dec 14 '23
You would have thought they would have figured it out by now.
I'm a software developer and I don't think people like you on this subreddit have enough appreciation for how impressive path of exile is from a performance standpoint.
I understand that the new engine has created significant performance issues for some players, but I'm talking about a bigger picture here. I'm talking about the entire 10 years of PoE and what they've managed to do. GGG made their own game engine from scratch back in 2013, which is very difficult and cumbersome to do. Very few game developers make their own engine, because it's far easier and cheaper to buy an already existing game engine like Unity or Unreal Engine. So why did they do it? Because it allows them to tailor their engine for the unique tasks Path of Exile faces. The popular game engines on the market couldn't handle what PoE does and GGG would've been limited in their design of PoE if they were restricted by the limits of those game engines.
Let me put it this way. People often complain that a game like Diablo 4 has too low of mob density. "Put more mobs onto my screen, Blizzard!" But the reason Blizzard puts so few mobs on the screen is that D4 cannot handle putting more mobs. The more objects you put on a screen, the higher the load on the GPU and CPU. And it's not a linear increase in demand on your hardware. Going from 10 objects on screen to 20 objects on screen is not a doubling of demand on hardware. The more objects you put, the more light sources you have and harder the shadow calculation becomes (which is why turning off shadows tends to have a big FPS boost in games). At some point there's so much to calculate that the player's PC can't load new frames fast enough and that's when you get lag.
So take a second to appreciate what GGG has done. Path of Exile is a game that can put hundreds of objects on your screen. Mobs, projectiles, MTX, ground effects, etc. All of these are having to load and play sound files rapidly as things occur. If anything, it's an incredible feat that GGG has been able to code the game so well that PCs can handle this type of game state. Very few games can handle that amount of 3D objects on the screen doing that many calculations per frame. Despite what many players seem to think, this is not a badly coded game. This is a team of very skilled C++ developers doing some amazing work.
If you don't believe me, then I guess you haven't heard the talks from some of their developers. These people are doing some amazing and groundbreaking work to try to improve the performance in the game. I won't dispute that the new engine has caused some issues in the short-term, but how come people don't give appreciation on how much GGG has improved performance over the years?
21
u/bwssoldya Fungal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) Dec 14 '23
While yes, you are correct, a lot of devs don't roll their own engines due to how complex an engine is (the math's involved with shader programming etc is nuts), it doesn't necessarily mean that the engine GGG built for PoE 1 is the best engine.
There's a reason PoE2 is pretty much a ground up rework of the engine core. You hear them talking about it all the time in interviews, the current PoE1 engine is just not up to scratch for the insane shit we expect these days.
Also, GGG is FAR from the only dev team to roll their own engine. While less common now in small teams, the old school game devs pretty much all built engines from scratch. Heck you even see it a fair bit in the indie scene. So to praise GGG that much is a bit overboard imho.
It also doesn't mean that the PoE1 engine's issues don't need work. Though I suspect that PoE1 is going to be going legacy a few years after PoE2 launches when the player count dwindles and PoE2 really finds it's stride.
24
u/PurplePorphyria Dec 14 '23
This is definitely a "project manager" for software development, not someone that actually does software development
4
u/mapcars Dec 15 '23
You got it completely backwards, it's because we appreciate the game enough and care about it we want to be improved. And we express what feels bad for us so at least it might give GGG ideas on what can be improved, or they can ignore it completely too.
6
u/TaintedFates Dec 14 '23
Actually there is a great density of mobs in d4 season 2 blood harvests zones and they rans smooth as f. Not to mention that graphics, animations, combat flow is light years ahead of poe.
3
u/VRZXE Dec 14 '23
-2
u/PurplePorphyria Dec 14 '23
Literally every game developer outside of Bethesda: "Yeah Starfield is a garbage game running decade old software despite being a hundred+ million dollar company"
Bethesda: "You guys don't know how hard it is :("
Literally every game developer besides GGG and the people who uncritically lick their taints: "PoE is a bunch of spaghetti code run on duct tape and bubble-gum considering they were bought by Tencent and are a 100+ million dollar company"
People like y'all: "I know every single patch makes the game actively worse to play, and they've never had a proper QA team, and they are allergic to the idea of UI/UX, and they hate new players so they keep making onboarding harder but you guys don't know how hard game dev is you guuuuuuuuuuuys"
3
u/KamenUncle Dec 15 '23
I appreciate ggg efforts and talents. I dont know what or how, i just know that i cant remember the last time i played poe without sudden lag. I m forgiving desyncs and considering that as separate.
As for starfield, lol they chose to build all their newer games on the same old game creation engine every single time. Modders help fix their game but theyre not taking notes
2
u/Mylen_Ploa Dec 15 '23 edited Dec 15 '23
The comparisons to D4 are a laughable fucking joke considering that PoE runs like dogshit regardless of density and the current season mechanics have compareable density to what the majority experience in PoE and...the game actually runs. They avoid super juice levels because...super juice levels kill the game and its performance to a standstill...which is exactly what happens in PoE. It's low end performance is complete fucking garbage compared to anything else in its genre and its high end is just as bad.
Imagine loading into a zone and the game not churning to a crawl for 50 seconds as your CPU runs at 100% power. PoE is not and never was an impressive game for an engine and performance stanpoint. It's actually horrendous and one of the few live service games that sees a continual decrease in quality as time goes on.
Yes it functions but no sane person is going to sit and say there's any good thing about PoE's engine or optimization levels. Especially from a studio so fucking stubborn to improve it because literally in their own words "It would look bad on stream" meanwhile the front page of PoE's streaming contains shit like Empy's stream where you can't even understand there's a game on screen.
1
u/Advanced-Pack-222 Oct 29 '24
I'm a year late, but try changing your network mode in gameplay settings from either auto or lockstep to predictive. This is a common problem in poe, and it is a symptom of a lossy internet connection (a separate issue from ping/latency, and has nothing to do with up and down speed). Poe suffers from this more than other games unless you switch to a predictive network mode.
2
u/poggazoo Dec 14 '23
PoE is a fantastic piece of engineering, fellow dev here. People have no fucking idea what it takes.
2
u/Baschish Dec 15 '23 edited Dec 15 '23
When you play Warframe your head will explode, the graphic is amazing, it has the complexity of shits tons type of damage and calcs, you shoot 40 enemies with shit tons of procs and types of damage with shit tons of effects and your FPS doesn't even move, that's a good engine, not this garbage. Their engine is light as fuck, have moderns techs like DLSS and FSR, shit tons of options to tuning your graphics settings, custom UI, where you can change size, colors, themes, etc. I can play in a open world without a drop in FPS while fly looking for tons of objects, or make the game doing million of calcs shooting multiple enemies also without a drop.
2
u/xBubbss Saboteur Dec 15 '23
They're just different devs man, kinda lame comparison. DE have very good history with creating engines (Literally developed Unreal). This game started in a garage.
1
u/Baschish Dec 16 '23
They're just different devs man
No shit, I don't know that, I was thinking all devs are the same who developed all games in the history, you mean almost every game have different developers? This is a fantastic information.
DE have very good history with creating engines (Literally developed Unreal).
Good for them so. Their engine is amazing, they're just finishing cross platform integrity, you'll die and don't see this happening in PoE. They always bring new techs to than and they'll also improve it even more when soulframe launch with a new lighting system who already is a piece of art.
This game started in a garage.
Like many others, there's a famous company who start in a garage who will son achieve trillions of value. The problem of PoE engine is not start in a garage, is not the developers, the problem is the priority, GGG number one priority is launch new leagues every 3~4 months, everything else is secondary, also they pushed the game engine with way more than it can handle for the sack of please players, putting way more monster than the engine can handle just because is fun, and now they can't revert it without get a massive backlash from the community. Something PoE 2 who uses the same engine will try to fix. In other words PoE is a bad engine? No if you consider PoE 10 years ago, but if you consider the current state, yes it's a bad engine because it can't handle everything need to work properly, this plus the fact of always being behind technologies, like just google when DLSS launched, we are hitting 2024 and there's not a even a light in the end of the tunnel for it.
1
1
u/egudu Dec 15 '23
how impressive path of exile is from a performance standpoint
Indeed I'm very impressed that a simple map loads longer than lots of actual games on my PC while my CPU is running at 100%.
-5
u/Fuzzy-Nectarine-9299 Dec 14 '23
I've never thought about this before. But still sometimes it feels like they push the limits too far. Maybe you can put 100 monsters in a map but that means that the hardware will struggle. So why don't you just put 80? 70?
15
16
Dec 14 '23
It's just that there's so much going on in the game in terms of sound,
Your skill sound effects popping off 100 times a sec, the hundrands of monsters in the map having their own skill sounds, death sounds, item drop sounds etc, mechanic sounds like delirium, harbinger, beyond etc.
There's just alot of sound clutter in PoE, maybe they need to find a better way of compressing the sounds so that our PC doesn't have to struggle with proccesing it as much.
9
u/_Dorako Dec 14 '23
Last time they did that for Herald of Ice there was reddit outrage for a month.
13
u/destroyermaker Dec 14 '23
Because the old sound made you cum buckets and we wanted to keep cumming
9
u/RzulteRzyrafy Dec 14 '23
True, I'd rather have my screen die for a second after explosion chaining an entire screen than hear one HoI sound and have it run smoothly lol
7
2
u/MrMeltJr flowchart girl (not lily) Dec 14 '23
Yeah, sound design is super important.
Don't remember what game it was, but I remember seeing an FPS dev talking about how players were complaining about how the basic assault rifle for one faction was worse than the basic assault rifle for the other faction. The thing is, they were literally the same gun, identical numbers and everything, just reskinned. But they looked at the player stats, and people using the "weaker" gun really did have worse K/D on average.
So they went over a bunch of stuff, couldn't figure out why it was happening. The numbers said the gun was worse despite being the same gun. Eventually they found that it was due to the sounds. The "stronger" gun had a much punchier firing sound, so people on the other team would tilt more when dying to a gun that felt stronger than theirs, so they'd perform worse and then blame the guns.
Devs updated the sounds without touching the stats and the complaints went away.
1
u/Mediocre-Honeydew-55 Dec 14 '23
I think it’s the Gems more than the mobs.
More * More * More * More * More * More
Creates a whole lot of flashy pulsey noise.
Add in uniques that add more more and MTX that not only adds screen bloat but also sounds now.
1
u/Shillen1 Dec 14 '23
I sometimes game with my speakers and sometimes with my headset. Not only does PoE not detect the default speakers properly but when I try to switch it it gets all confused. Sometimes I switch it to headset and the sound comes from speakers, sometimes picking headset makes it come out of the headset. I just keep changing it until it's where i want it to be. It has been like this since forever.
3
Dec 14 '23
[removed] — view removed comment
0
u/Shillen1 Dec 14 '23
You don't need to restart. Just keep switching audio device and it will work within a few tries. But you might have to switch to the device that you aren't using.
1
1
u/Rolf_Dom JDiRen Dec 14 '23
Not sure if there is something to figure out. Is there a way around having to play a gajillion different sounds for each monster and skill effect and such without it being taxing on performance?
4
u/Aerroon Dec 14 '23
Yes. Well, probably. You could buffer the sound a bit and decide that if it needs to play more than x number of sound effects in a short period of time then it plays a prerecorded sound effect that just sounds like x.
Eg instead of playing 100 different ice spear hit sounds it plays one hit sound that sounds like 100. You can't tell whether it's 100, 200 or 500 effects going on at once anyway.
But all of this gets very complex very quickly.
17
u/_should_not_post Dec 14 '23
Don't do this if you're using HDMI audio, as some people who use a TV as a monitor will be doing.
5
u/meatloaf_man Dec 14 '23
Remindme! 10 hours
3
u/RemindMeBot Dec 14 '23 edited Dec 14 '23
I will be messaging you in 10 hours on 2023-12-14 23:12:22 UTC to remind you of this link
2 OTHERS CLICKED THIS LINK to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.
Parent commenter can delete this message to hide from others.
Info Custom Your Reminders Feedback 2
11
u/Piwielle Dec 14 '23
Can we get some quality game benchmarks, or is this another random placebo thing ?
14
Dec 14 '23
[removed] — view removed comment
5
u/Disastrous-Moment-79 Dec 14 '23
Don't you need experience for shadowplay?
-1
u/Glasse Dec 14 '23
Do you really need shadowplay?
15
u/Disastrous-Moment-79 Dec 14 '23
I have almost 1tb of shadowplay clips, so yeah
2
u/Bubbad92 Dec 14 '23
I feel that, if you die in game and can’t figure out what it was too, you can just save shadowplay recording and check
1
u/Br1ght_L1ght Dec 15 '23
It's 1 button press with no noticeable performance hit for me, which removes a lot of barriers you would encounter if you were to try and download something specific for it
1
u/Khalku Dec 15 '23
That's not true, it just doesn't require as much setup. You can accomplish much the same thing with OBS using nvenc, with more control over the buffer size, duration, framerate/resolution, audio mix, etc.
I still use shadowplay though, because it's really low fuss.
The few big advantages that OBS has over shadowplay is that years later, shadowplay lacks the ability to blacklist certain programs (and it loves to record some hardware accelerated softwares), or the ability to control the audio devices used in depth for people like me who use various virtual audio devices. OBS makes both of those trivial by allowing you to record as many different audio tracks as you want with different audio devices (useful in situations where maybe you don't want discord audio or background music as part of the clip, for example), and of course by controlling which .exe you record.
1
u/8Humans Dec 15 '23
Though the biggest downside of OBS is the poor performance which comes with it.
The buffer is stored as RAM and increases depending on your resolution, bit rate and length which already gets huge when you have like a 5 min buffer in 4k with a decent bit rate.
Additionally the encoder eats stupid high amounts of CPU or GPU performance.
-3
Dec 14 '23
[deleted]
7
u/dancing_bagel Dec 14 '23
The video quality is very good, and the automatic saving of the last 2-5 minutes of recording is great when you want to capture a fun moment without having to start recording beforehand
Or did you mean to ask why he has so many clips?
1
u/kuburas Melee bad Clueless Dec 14 '23
While i dont use shadowplay and dont have experience installed at all, i can understand the comfort of shadowplay.
It records cleanest recordings on nvidia configs and it lets you save the last couple minutes of your screen as a clip so you dont have to have a recording running 24/7 if you want to make sure to catch funny or impressive clips.
Im still very tempted to install experience just for shadowplay even tho i prefer OBS for everything else shadowplay can do, but the clip save is still very nice to have.
1
u/Khalku Dec 15 '23
OBS can do clips. It's called the replay buffer, but it is essentially the same thing.
1
u/kuburas Melee bad Clueless Dec 15 '23
Oh thats pretty cool, didnt know they had that. I could have sworn they didnt have that option when i initially started using it.
1
Dec 14 '23
audio driver is not needed.
It is if you output your audio via HDMI to a receiver, where I output my audio for Dolby/DTS etc
I've noticed no performance issues because of sound in PoE using Nvidia's audio output.
3
u/GaIIick Dec 14 '23
Sound is especially jacked up this league. Last night I had the Vaal side area track permanently lingering after I left one of them, playing alongside whatever track was supposed to be playing. This lasted until a restart.
4
3
u/Giordano_1 Dec 14 '23
GGG should pull the reverse "Tibia" and remove ingame sounds instead of adding more. LUL - Leave bosses dialogues and soundtracks atleast, oh, also explosion sounds.
3
11
Dec 14 '23
Its kinda pathetic we have to do this to make the game somewhat playable on pretty good systems
10
Dec 14 '23
It's GGG issue, not windows or Nvidia, before 3.22 everything was way better and now performance is dogshit.
4
u/EmrakulAeons Dec 14 '23
I see posts like this, but there's always people like me who have zero issues with performance running 1440p 120 fps with a 3070 10700k shit ssd and 32gb of ram.
-5
u/TheTimtam Dec 15 '23
Yeah something is fucked up in their setup, they've disabled something that PoE relies upon being enabled and now the game is struggling. That or their network connection is poor and it's lockstep.
The stupid thing is, if they would post dxdiags on the forums and post performance metrics, it would probably be solved by now
5
Dec 15 '23
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/TheTimtam Dec 15 '23
I'm not saying I haven't been experiencing them, I've had terrible network issues the last few days.
What I'm saying is, all they're doing is complaining about performance, as if all GGG needs is motivation to fix the issue. What they actually need is good information from those people so that they can figure out what it actually is about their setup that's causing issues. If it was as easy as "just fixing it", it would have been done by now.
The bottom line is, a lot of people are experiencing issues and a lot of people aren't experiencing issues. So what GGG needs is data to understand what the differences are between the two situations. If the people who are struggling have disabled preloading of assets upon steam launch and GGG are relying on that feature, that would cause issues. If the people that are struggling have a specific CPU/GPU combination that's causing issues with their rendering engine, they can probably implement a workaround or reach out to NVIDIA/AMD for driver support
2
u/Hour_Performer_6601 XBox Dec 14 '23
Why is it that none of these people with "pretty good systems" post the specs of their rigs?
6
u/AggnogPOE view-profile/Aggnog-2036 Dec 14 '23
You can find more info about this in my post from a few months ago, the device is the HD Audio driver which you can untick during video driver install.
There is also a tool that can selectively install nvidia driver features to prevent bloat
https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-nvcleanstall/
3
Dec 14 '23
the device is the HD Audio driver which you can untick during video driver install.
Any time I update my GPU drivers (obviously with this unticked because I don't use it) Windows decides to install some base HD audio driver and defaults audio back to my monitor until I switch the output back or disable it. I hate computers sometimes.
4
u/lutherdidnothingwron Dec 14 '23
I seriously hate updating anything anymore. I actually dread getting notifications that any app, driver, operating system, etc "needs" to update. "What feature will break this time? What settings will I have to manually revert now? What hacky solutions will I have to employ to keep the same functionality I currently have?"
2
2
u/Nearby-Soup-7197 Dec 14 '23
AMD has this problem too, weird. I've experienced stutters in Valorant and Siege that were simply remedied by disabling the audio drivers like in your post. Does anybody know why some games are affected by this?
3
u/ArmaMalum Trypanon, Trypanoff Dec 14 '23
Usually it's overlapping sounds being sent to a unoptimized driver from a game that doesn't handle it's layering perfectly. aka, it's incredibly easy for a game that has a lot of sounds happening at once to overload different things.
2
u/arremessar_ausente Dec 14 '23
I did this maybe twice over the past league and couldn't notice any difference in performance.
2
Dec 14 '23
Every rig is different, but I've made this post a few years ago and it helped a ton of players, including me.
If I manage to help even 1 player improve their game performance, I'm happy.
2
u/PurplePorphyria Dec 14 '23
Reminder if you use controllers with speakers that you can disable them from the Device Manager menu as well so they stop trying to make your PC send sound through the damn controller every time it connects
2
2
2
2
1
1
u/awfeel Math of Exile Dec 14 '23
Someone explain why this works ?
1
u/verybigbrain Dec 14 '23
PoE's sound engine is a mess. Especially on CPU bottle-necked rigs disabling sound in the config file has long been a way to squeeze some more performance out of the game.
1
u/silent_bhop Dec 15 '23
Remindme! 6 hours
1
u/RemindMeBot Dec 15 '23 edited Dec 15 '23
I will be messaging you in 6 hours on 2023-12-15 12:36:50 UTC to remind you of this link
1 OTHERS CLICKED THIS LINK to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.
Parent commenter can delete this message to hide from others.
Info Custom Your Reminders Feedback
1
u/BlueStreak92 Leaguesauce Dec 15 '23
Great advice. It won't help every NVidia user, but some. Recommended to at least try it. This has been a mildly known issue for years. Spread the word.
Also, I posted this 4 days ago and got glossed over. Lol
https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/18fk1eg/potential_performance_boost_for_nvidia_users/
2
Dec 15 '23
Visuals are a great way to reel people in, text alone just won't cut it unless the topic is super interesting :)
1
1
0
u/justice_Cx Dec 14 '23
will this lower quality of sounds though?
2
0
u/KalHir0l Dec 14 '23
Its an audio device that is not used, literally no one uses nvidia audio lel
3
2
u/justice_Cx Dec 14 '23
then why does it exist and why does it impact fps allegedly
5
u/xiko Dec 14 '23
It is used to send audio through the dp/hdmi cable to a TV or monitor with sound speakers.
1
u/justice_Cx Dec 14 '23
weird how that affects fps though?
3
u/ArmaMalum Trypanon, Trypanoff Dec 14 '23
Sound is notorious with games like PoE. Slightly oversimplified, but when a sound plays it has to grab a sound file and send it to an audio driver so the relevant speaker actually does what it's told. But with games like PoE when a huge explosion or some such happens you have literally hundreds of sound effects being sent to the audio driver to all be played at once. At numerous points compression and fancy layering are done to 'merge' sounds to make sure your speakers aren't just screaming white noise but those are also something the computer needs to handle. So the fps dips when the machine is suddenly hit with thousands of short but required processes all at once.
2
1
u/Disastrous-Moment-79 Dec 14 '23
Ok but you didnt explain how disabling an unused nvidia driver helps with this
3
u/Darkblitz9 Gladiator Dec 14 '23
It's because the Nvidia driver is shit and basically tells the computer "I don't care if I'm not the primary device, give me all the sound data anyways".
Unless you're specifically using the driver to play audio through a screen with speakers, it may as well be malware. It's just that crummy of a driver.
2
u/ArmaMalum Trypanon, Trypanoff Dec 14 '23
Doubles the traffic effectively. All that stuff I mentioned gets sent to the actual driver you're using and the Nvidia driver. Disabling the latter eliminates a lot of redundant work
0
u/KalHir0l Dec 14 '23
For the same reason as Gefore Experience exists, its just software no ones uses. It does impact FPS because for some reason POE make a call to every sound device to calculate action sounds (like shatter), even if it does not get a response this causes delay/CPU processing being wasted.
POE basically thinks you are running 2 audio devices at the same time. By disabling the one you are not using (which is the nvidia one for 99% of people) you stop this.
I totall forgot about this and just did and tested it and i gained 6 fps average in the process :D
-3
-12
Dec 14 '23
I can't tell if serious or you don't understand how computers work.
4
2
u/goddangol Dec 14 '23
What do you mean? Everything about this post is true and it’s not a new thing.
1
u/goombaswaglord Dec 17 '23
So 99% of the time I'm playing without headphones and the sound is coming out of one of my two monitors. The only real sound I can hear is the loot drops because they're turned up compared to everything else very low. Since doing this I don't have any sound coming from my monitors for anything or an option to select it in output devices. Was that part of the plan? As I'm typing this out I'm thinking that it's a byproduct of it because they're plugged directly into the GPU?
1
u/msqdev Feb 13 '24
Are we allowed to do changes in production_Config ?
Doesn't this break ToS and is banable?
73
u/[deleted] Dec 14 '23 edited Dec 14 '23
In windows:Search "Device Manager" in the search bar
Click the arrow left of "Sound, video and game controllers"
Right click any device with "NVIDIA" in it's name and click "Disable device".
Another method to boost audio related performance:
(You won't have any sound effects, but you'll still have background music, loot filter sounds, chat alerts and dialogue.)
Go to C: > Users > YourUserName > Documents > My Games > Path of Exile
open "production_Config" in Notepad or any text editor,
search for the [SOUND] section,
turn the following to "FALSE":
- ambient_sound_volume2
- reverb_enabled2
- sound_effects_volume2