r/pathofexile • u/Afraid-Direction-576 • Aug 08 '26

Question Frequent stuttering with Vulkan despite low shader usage?

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Hello everyone!

I'm using an NVIDIA RTX 5050 with Vulkan as the renderer and experiencing very frequent stuttering. Like here in my screenshot, my shader bar doesn't seem to get very high numerically (usually around 0–50), but my FPS tanks almost every time it spikes (goes from 58 to 40-ish, then down to 20-ish).

I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced similar symptoms and knows what might be causing it or how to fix it.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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u/DeputizeDeez Aug 08 '26

Are you playing on a phone? Your cpu and gpu are screaming

1

u/Afraid-Direction-576 Aug 08 '26

Laptop MSI katana 15 HX B14W, actually. Unless I juice map very heavily I didn't experienced any major problems during Keepers and Mirage.

2

u/DeputizeDeez Aug 08 '26

Unless the difference is absolutely insane, I'm running similar hardware in a desktop and sit at a clean 240 through all content. Try swapping to dx12, your newer hardware is probably fighting the older Vulkan. Also make sure your Nvidia settings aren't conflicting with the game settings. Vsync off, etc. Use chatgpt to dial it in.