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
Min Specs
- OS: 64-bit Windows 10.
- CPU: Intel Core i7-7700 | AMD Ryzen 5 2500x.
- Memory: 8 GB.
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960|Intel Arc A380 |AMD Radeon RX 470.
- Storage: 100 GB available space
Rec Specs
- OS: 64-bit Windows 10.
- CPU: Intel Core i5-10500 | AMD Ryzen 5 3700X.
- Memory: 16 GB.
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 |Intel Arc A770 |AMD Radeon RX 5600XT.
- Storage: 100 GB available space (SSD)
Resolution & Graphics Presets
Path of Exile 2 shows healthy scaling across all 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.
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.
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.
There’s a stark difference in lighting, including shadows, ambient occlusion, and global illumination quality:
- Ultra features deeper, more defined shadows, covering intricate foliage, which is generally excluded at lower settings.
- Low features minimal ambient occlusion, often rendering partial shadows. This is most evident with trees and ground vegetation.
- It also drops global illumination. Consequently, spells no longer illuminate their surroundings, resulting in a duller world.
Texture Quality
Path of Exile 2 features two texture settings, “Medium” and “High.” Texture Quality usually doesn’t impact the frame rates, only the VRAM usage (unless you exceed the limits).
- PoE 2 uses 5-6 GB of graphics memory at “Medium.”
- It scales up to 8 GB at the “High” quality setting.
- Players with 4 GB VRAM should opt for “Medium.”
- Everyone else should be good with “High.”
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: Shadows and Global Illumination
Lighting controls the types of lights enabled. You 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 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, one of the fundamentals of modern 3D graphics.
- Curiously, global illumination has no impact on shadows cast as the 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 that 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.
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.”
- 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. The high quality option nets 199 FPS.
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 mainly affects the shadow resolution of sun shadows and any spotlights not in the environment. Shadow lengths remain the same. We tested this setting during combat.
As seen above, the performance uplift is minimal, but there is room 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
- High adds lights on effects that can be duplicated many times, like projectiles.
Curiously, in our testing, the spell lights were always visible. The global illumination quality influences whether or not these spells will cast a light onto the surroundings.
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: NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, Intel XeSS, and NIS. 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 the balanced or performance preset. This should boost frame rates by at least 20-30%.
- Avoid “Ultra Performance,” as the gains are almost always not worth the quality drop.
- Upgrade to DLSS 4 for superior visuals at lower resolutions. A guide.
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.
Foreground and background FPS cap
We recommend keeping this off unless you’re on a portable and want to limit power consumption.
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.
Triple-buffering
Keep this at on, unless you’re having latency issues.
Dynamic Resolution
Enable this if you’re falling below your target FPS after all the above optimizations.
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.
NVIDIA Reflex
Keep this at “On”. Switch to “On+Boost” if you’re CPU-limited.
Dynamic Culling
Recommend keeping this off unless you’re really struggling for frames or stutters during intense action scenes.
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 its 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.” Here’s a dedicated guide for budget PCs.
| 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 |
