Path of Exile 2 Optimization: Best Graphics Settings for PC

Path of Exile 2 is finally out in early access on multiple platforms for various supporter levels. An ARPG developed by Grinding Gear Games and a sequel to the critically acclaimed Path of Exile, this highly anticipated game features multiple new locations and bosses with an in-depth skill upgrade system for its various classes, with much more to come in its full release slated for 2025. In this optimization guide, we’ll review every graphics setting, benchmark it, and find the optimal settings to achieve the best visual fidelity and sweet FPS.

Windows/System Settings to Optimize

• Enable Resizable BAR.
• Turn on Game Mode.
• Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
• Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
• Disable Memory Integrity. Windows Menu->VBS->Device Security.
• Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
• Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
• Here’s a guide with more detailed instructions.

Path of Exile 2: PC Requirements

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Test Setup

• CPU: Intel Core i7-14700K.
• Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer III 420.
• GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE.
• Motherboard: MSI PRO Z790-P WIFI.
• Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.

Resolution & Graphics Presets

Before we begin, we recommend pressing “F1” to bring up the in-game performance metrics which shows the FPS and other helpful information to help determine any performance bottlenecks, be it network or storage.

Path of Exile 2 shows healthy scaling across all the three most common resolutions. From 167 FPS at 4K “Ultra”, we achieve an average of 189 FPS at 1440p and 225 FPS at 1080p with no upscaling or other shenanigans. These are impressive frame rates, suggesting good software-level optimization and all the CPU cores seemed engaged equally.

Path of Exile 2 doesn’t present any “preset” options per se, just the “default” and other options. So we benched everything at high, labeled it “Ultra,” and everything at low and called it “Low.”

That’s impressive scaling and FPS gained on dropping from “Ultra” to “Low” at 4K, namely a 33% increase from 167 FPS to 223 FPS.

Texture Quality

Path of Exile 2 features two texture settings “Medium” and “High.” Texture Quality usually doesn’t impact FPS only the amount of VRAM used. We observed a VRAM usage of 5-6 GB (including background processes) at the “Medium” setting, and around 8 GB at the “High” setting. Purely game-wise, the game uses around 3 GB and around 5 GB respectively for those settings, so it’s possible to get away with those if you have everything else shut down.

As expected, there is no FPS impact. If you have 4 GB VRAM or less, keep it at “Medium.” 6-8 GB and higher should get away with “High.” Just keep those background processes or multiple monitors off. 8 GB and higher should have no issues.

Texture Filtering

Texture Filtering maintains the sharpness and detail of distant (perpendicular to the screen) textures. The lower-quality option employs “Trilinear filtering”, while higher-quality options leverage the newer and more effective “Anisotropic Filtering”.

As seen below, dropping it to trilinear gives a measly 1.5% boost and the rest of the AF settings are within margin of error with each other to such an extent that they’re mixed up in order. Keep this at “16x Anisotropic Filtering” or anything you wish since the game screen is mostly perpendicular which means this effect isn’t even really noticeable.

Lighting Options (Shadows and Global Illumination)

Path of Exile 2 features one main lighting option, with further sub-options that are influenced by this one option. Let’s break it down since these are the main graphics options in the game.

Lighting

Lighting controls which types of lights are enabled. We can choose between just “Shadows” and “Shadows + Global Illumination (GI)”

Shadows enable shadows for all light types. The first here is “sun shadows”. As the name suggests, these are cast by the sun/environment and increase as the number of objects or monsters on the screen increases.

The other type is the “Non-Sun Shadows“, cast by any other light sources within the environment on the screen. We noticed this does not include our spells or any dynamic action lights, just the environmental ones like bonfires, etc

Global Illumination here refers to all bright objects emitting light. It also enables Ambient Occlusion which is very important for a game to look good. There’s no in-between, it’s just on or off here. Curiously in this game, having Global Illumination on has no impact on shadows cast as these objects emitting light do so independently of the shadows. For example, with global illumination, you’ll notice a flickering from the flames, but those flickers cast no shadows.

This explains why the game states GI has a fixed performance cost independent of the action. The same goes for non-sun shadows, as they are only cast by fixed non-sun lights, not dynamic lights cast by spells, etc. All that theory aside, how does it perform? Let’s have a look at the benches to see the real data.

First, let’s look at the “Lighting” option with GI enabled and with it disabled. We noticed a huge 32% increase in FPS from 167 FPS with “Shadows + GI” to 221 FPS with only “Shadows.” Instead of keeping GI off though, we recommend going with “Shadows + GI” but turning down the settings we’re going to be seeing next.

Shadow + GI Quality

Depending on whether you picked only shadows or shadows + GI, this setting changes its quality. As seen below, by keeping “Shadow + GI Quality Low,” we can almost reach the same FPS by keeping GI off, which is 211 FPS. Keeping it at high gives us 199 FPS, both a good increase over the “Ultra” setting.

We observed a steady increase in the shadow resolution and the cast length from low to Ultra. Meanwhile, GI subtly increases its range while greatly enhancing the ambient occlusion.

By keeping GI off and cycling through these settings, we see a very small increase in FPS, and is once again not worth it. Go with “Shadows + GI” and a “Quality” of “High“.

Sun Shadow Quality

Sun Shadow Quality is fairly straightforward. It affects mainly the shadow resolution of the shadows cast by the environment (the sun) and any spotlights not in the environment. Shadow lengths remain the same. We tested this setting under action.

As seen above, the performance uplift is minimal but there is scope for it to increase depending on the number of enemies. Still, stick with “High“.

Number of Lights

This setting as the name implies controls the number of lights rendered. Once again, this has no effect on the number of shadows rendered as the game doesn’t use dynamic lights for it. Hence the performance uplift is minimal. As seen below, we go from 140 FPS at “High” to 146 at “Medium” and 147 at “Low”.

“Low” renders only the environmental lights, “Medium” adds lights on dynamic effects like skills, and “High” adds lights on effects that can be duplicated many times like projectiles. Curiously in our testing, the lights were always visible. “Low” had lights on our fire spell casts, as did “High”. The global illumination setting influences whether or not these spells will cast a light onto the surroundings.

You might as well save those extra frames and keep this at “Medium“. However, in the screenshots above, we noticed a random light in the forest disappear between “High” to “Medium”, which signifies it’s tied not just to attacks but to environments too. If you do not want to miss out on these, keep it at “High“.

Water Detail Level

“Water Detail Level” adjusts the detail of water textures, with higher quality options enabling refraction (caustics), wetness, and ripples. Reducing it to the lowest improves performance by 3%. Unless you’re in a very watery area, keep this at “High“.

Upscaling & Frame Generation

Path of Exile 2 features a variety of different upscaling options. NIS (NVIDIA Image Scaling), FSR (AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution), XeSS (Xe Super Sampling) and DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling).

So what do you pick? Ideally, if you’re already getting your target frames, nothing. If you’re using an NVIDIA GPU, stick with DLSS as it’s generally superior in image quality.

At 4K, going from Native to DLSS Quality (or equivalent) gives us an average loss in FPS, which means you’d want to pick “Balanced” or lower. At 4K, we recommend “DLSS Performance.” This should net you a healthy 20% boost in frames on average. Avoid “Ultra Performance” as the gains are almost always negligible for horrible-looking image quality.

Additional Settings

Renderer

This selects the rendered backend API. Stick with DirectX12 or Vulkan, depending on which causes fewer stutters. This is entirely dependent on a particular Windows system, so try changing this after all the optimizations we’ve done above and see if you notice any stutters.

Try to stay away from DirectX11 as it’s deprecated, unless as the game suggests, you have a very small VRAM budget in which case it could help.

Display

The primary display you want to game on, but also the GPU used. If you’re on a laptop, make sure the dedicated discrete GPU is selected and not the internal embedded one.

Mode

Not much impact noticed here, usually fullscreen exclusive performs the best. But In this game, Windowed Fullscreen performs just as well. Personal preference.

VSync

If you’re noticing frame tearing (horizontal lines across the screen) try keeping this at “Adaptive”. If you’re getting a healthy frame rate, you can just keep this off.

Dynamic Resolution

Enable this if you’re falling below your target FPS after all the above optimizations.

Window Resolution

Always stick with the resolution of your main monitor, regardless of your PC specs. If you have a 4K monitor on a low end, keep this at 4K and vice versa. Later on, use the upscaling options to turn it down internally.

Sharpness, HDR, bloom etc

All personal choices, no FPS impact.

NVIDIA Reflex

Keep this at “On”. Switch to “On+Boost” if you’re CPU-limited.

Foreground and background FPS cap

We recommend keeping this off unless you’re on a portable and want to limit power consumption.

Triple-buffering

Keep this at on, unless you’re having latency issues.

Dynamic Culling

Recommend keeping this off unless you’re really struggling for frames or stutters during intense action scenes.

Target Framerate

A target framerate for the dynamic scaling and other culling options to kick in, if your FPS drops below this set limit. Keep this at around a few FPS higher than your monitor’s refresh rate if you’re using this.

Engine Multithreading (Important)

Keep this always on no matter what.

Path of Exile 2: VRAM Usage

Path of Exile 2 uses up to 9 GB of graphics memory (inclusive of Windows processes) at 4K “Ultra.” Reducing the texture quality to “Medium” reduces it to ~6 GB. The game is very modest with it’s VRAM usage, especially compared to a certain ARPG competitor Diablo 4 which has horrible VRAM and texture optimization issues.

1080p and 1440p leverage over 6-7 GB at the “Ultra” quality settings. Enabling upscaling reduces the graphics memory consumption by a very tiny amount. (~200 MB per upscaling level)

Path of Exile 2: CPU Bottlenecks

Path of Exile 2 is incredibly well-optimized, with an absolute 0% GPU-Busy deviation in all use cases, even on the lower resolutions. The only stutters possible here are usually due to a network lag, a bottleneck in the storage access, memory (RAM) access, or an overflow in the VRAM buffers.

Ensure the option “engine multithreading” is turned on to allow for multithreaded operations by Path of Exile 2 utilizing all the CPU cores.

Optimized Settings for Path of Exile 2

Graphics Settings	High-end	Midrange	Low-end PC
Resolution	4K (3840×2160)	1440p (2560×1440)	1080p (1920×1080)
FPS Target	200+ FPS	~150 FPS	60 FPS
Texture Quality	High	High	High (6+ GB VRAM)/ Low (<6 GB VRAM)
Texture Filtering	AF 16x	AF 16x	AF 16x
Lighting	Shadows + Global Illumination	Shadows + Global Illumination	Shadows + Global Illumination
Shadow + GI Quality	Ultra	High	Low
Sun Shadow Quality	High	High	High
Number of Lights	High	High	Medium
Water Quality	High	High	High
Upscaling	DLSS/FSR, Balanced/Performance	DLSS/FSR Balanced	NIS 77%/67% or DLSS/FSR Quality/Balanced

CPU	Core i9-14900K/Ryzen 7 7800X3D	Core i7-13700K/Ryzen 7 7700X	Core i5-12600/ Ryzen 5 5600
GPU	GeForce RTX 4090	GeForce RTX 4070/Radeon RX 7900 GRE	GeForce RTX 3060/3060 Ti/4060
Memory	32GB (dual-channel)	16GB (dual-channel)	Less than: 16GB (dual-channel)
	High-end	Midrange	Low-end PC

Graphics Settings	RTX 4090	RTX 4080	RTX 4070 Ti	RTX 4070 Super	RTX 3080 Ti	RTX 4070
Resolution	4K	4K	4K	4K	4K	4K
FPS Target	144 FPS	144 FPS	75	60 FPS	60 FPS	60 FPS
Texture Quality	High	High	High	High	High	High
Texture Filtering	AF 16x	AF 16x	AF 16x	AF 16x	AF 16x	AF 16x
Lighting	Shadows + Global Illumination	Shadows + Global Illumination	Shadows + Global Illumination	Shadows + Global Illumination	Shadows + Global Illumination	Shadows + Global Illumination
Shadow + GI Quality	Ultra	Ultra	Ultra	Ultra	Ultra	Ultra
Sun Shadow Quality	High	High	High	High	High	High
Number of Lights	High	High	High	High	High	High
Water Quality	High	High	High	High	High	High
Upscaling	DLAA (DLSS)	DLSS Balanced	DLSS Balanced	DLSS Balanced	DLSS Balanced	DLSS Balanced

Path of Exile 2 Settings for Low-end PC: RTX 3060, RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 4060 & RX 6600

Path of Exile 2 performs well on budget and low-end hardware. Our entry-level test setup consisting of a Core i5-12600 and a GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB averaged 68 FPS at 1440p. The result was obtained with DLSS set to “Balanced” mode, and Global Illumination (GI) set to “High.”

Using our other setup with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and the Radeon RX 6600 at 1080p, we average a 43 FPS at the Max Preset and 90 FPS at the Low Preset. Using our optimized settings, we gain an 80% boost of up to 78 FPS (with upscaling FSR set to Balanced) and 71 FPS (without any upscaling).

At 1440p, we get a massive 127% FPS boost from a measly 27 FPS at ultra to a healthy 62 FPS with our optimized settings (with upscaling FSR set to Balanced) and 50 FPS with no upscaling.

The game remained GPU-bound with a GPU-Busy deviation of 6% at 1080p and 1440p using the below settings. The VRAM usage didn’t exceed 6 GB at 1440p, peaking at 5.5 GB at 1080p.

Graphics Settings	RTX 3060	RTX 4060	RTX 3060 Ti	RX 6600
Resolution	1080p|1440p	1080p|1440p	1080p|1440p	1080p|1440p
FPS Target	60 FPS	60 FPS	60 FPS	60 FPS
Texture Quality	High	High	High	High
Texture Filtering	AF 16x	AF 16x	AF 16x	AF 16x
Lighting	Shadows + Global Illumination	Shadows + Global Illumination	Shadows + Global Illumination	Shadows + Global Illumination
Shadow + GI Quality	High	High	Ultra	Low
Sun Shadow Quality	High	High	High	High
Number of Lights	High	High	High	Medium
Water Quality	High	High	High	High
Upscaling	DLSS Quality|Balanced	DLSS Quality|Balanced	DLSS Quality|Balanced	FSR Quality|Balanced