[2019] Upgraded pc only for this game and still runs bad

Johnolesen77,

First things first - as you have replaced some of your hardware, can you please confirm for me that you have specifically uninstalled the driver for your previous video card - preferably by using Display Driver Uninstaller - and then downloaded the latest RTX 2070 Super driver from Nvidia’s website and selected the Clean Install option when installing it?

If I remember correctly, you play Last Epoch at 1080p with a 60 Hz monitor. There is no reason why your computer would not be able to run the game well at that resolution and refresh rate. If we can rule out potential driver issues, I would like to investigate other potential causes of performance issues - for example, hardware overheating and then throttling, software conflicts, the game running on integrated graphics instead of your video card, looking into whether your character’s specific build is performing particularly poorly and needs to be addressed on our end, and so on. We are happy to look into this, but it will take time for us to do so.

If the issue is one of a steady low framerate, then I do believe that it is resolvable - and resolvable in a way which does not involve you spending more money. You say that you won’t spend additional money on your computer, however we haven’t asked you to - in fact, I may gently make the point that we didn’t previously suggest this to you, either.

It would help a lot if you could provide a more detailed description of the issue, as I am not certain whether the problem is a consistently low framerate, stuttering, performance which starts out okay and gets worse over time, or another issue. “Lagging” is an umbrella term - and unfortunately it isn’t specific enough to inform our troubleshooting efforts.

If you aren’t certain what the issue is, the first step of identifiying it would be to open the game and tap the F11 key to display the framerate. Playing for a few minutes and monitoring this would give us more information. What numbers are you seeing? Is it consistent? Does it change dramatically based on what you are doing in-game? Does it start off high and then gradually decrease? Does it periodically shoot down super low, then recover?

While I am here, I would also like to address a couple of the points you have made.

One way games are optimized is through the use of profilers, which analyze the frametime - how much time it takes to create each frame - and report on why it took that long. We look at how much of that time was spent on lightning, how much time was spent on AI, and so on. This necessitates running profilers with as many different hardware configurations as possible (e.g. testing with both an i9-9900k and RTX 2080 Ti, and an FX-6300 & R9 270) to see where bottlenecks exist across both higher-end and lower-end hardware configurations.

It also necessitates running profilers in many different zones, while playing as many builds as possible. After releasing patches we’ve seen reports of FPS literally being doubled for some people, while for others there was no significant difference. This can be due to either the work specifically optimizing particular settings, work focusing on improving very specific parts of the game code (Damage Over Time, for example), or addressing an issue with a particular hardware architecture. There will never be a single patch which fixes all performance issues for all people - and this is true of not just Last Epoch, but of all games.

As with any other aspect of game development, optimization is a lot of work and takes a lot of time. I’m not sure if you are aware, but Last Epoch was funded on KickStarter in May of last year. It has been in development for much less time than some other games you play, and this means we have had less time to investigate and resolve causes of performance problems. To say that, because we have not in a few months achieved what other, larger teams have achieved in a couple of years suggests we will never achieve it is not exactly fair.

I personally play Last Epoch at 1440p with a Ryzen 7 1700 (upgrading to a 3900X soon), Vega 56, and 32 GB of RAM. Both your CPU and GPU generally perform better than mine in games, so if I can play at 1440p, I am quite certain that we can get you going at 1080p.

If it’s a framerate issue, something is artificially lowering it - we can figure that out and address it. If it’s stutter, then it’s likely some kind of conflict. Again, once we have more information, I am confident that we’ll be able to track it down and resolve it.

Hi again,

Apologies for the delay in getting back to you. I’d been speaking with members of our team regarding your reported FPS with Vertical Sync enabled and disabled, as from what you’ve told us there’s likely to a bug there - and we had been curious whether addressing the bug would have a significant effect on performance. It’s now looking like this isn’t the case, so I’m happy to proceed with troubleshooting normally without that being a distraction.

I find it interesting that your FPS is low when first entering a zone, and then gradually improves as you are in that zone for longer. One thing I’m wondering is whether a component is seeing higher temperatures during loading screens, throttling to get cooler, and then gradually raising clock speeds as the temperature improves. Overheating would usually be associated with the inverse of this observation, but if loading screens are the issue then it could still be the cause.

There is a free program called HWMonitor, which is available here. There is also a paid ‘Pro’ version, however this isn’t necessary. Could you please use the Setup button to download HWMonitor, install it on your system, and then run HWMonitor and have it open in the background while you play the game? Ideally playing normally - entering both towns and other zones, experiencing a few loading screens, and so on - so that the temperatures reported by HWMonitor will be representative of how the game performs on your system.

Here is an example of a screenshot of HWMonitor showing the temperature information;
 

 
While it isn’t possible upload images to our website directly, they can be upload to Imgur and linked to from a forum post. A direct link (ending in .jpg or .png usually) will embed like my own screenshot above, but an ordinary link would also be fine.