devtrackers.gg
I don't claim to be a mythbuster, but I have seen many people repeating points that are troublesome. I'll jog down some thoughts, and please add to or correct this post if you are within the technical field, especially if you are also in the game industry.
Note that while this post will sound like I'm defending GGG (And I am to a degree), I of course also admit that the game's performance has been getting worse over the years for me personally. I'm lucky enough to not have that impact my experience too much, however. The only time when I was actually annoyed was the beginning of Delirium.
DX12/Vulkan:
Just because a game uses one doesn't mean they will magically gain 40%, 30%, or 20% frames. Otherwise, every major (and probably minor) studio would be implementing them already. The benefits of Vulkan was greatly blown out of proportion with Doom 2016 (link), where we could see a 30% to 40% FPS gain with certain AMD cards. Word of mouth gradually made some people believe that it's a 30% to 40% gain across the board.
A more realistic result is perhaps this, where the highest FPS gain is roughly 20-23% on the RTX 2080 and 2080TI, which costs $1200. In some other results I've seen, Vulkan has only <10% average FPS gain over DX11.
Of course that is still a net gain for a software update, and I don't see a drawback if it's implemented well. Just don't hope that Vulkan will double your FPS and give you 3 exalts per minute. And speaking of implementation-
Get more people working then:
GGG can't "just hire more people". There are some hurdles. 1) Last I heard from GGG (or Chris, I can't remember), NZ law requires them to hire from within NZ first, which limits the candidate pool. 2) Hiring technical personnel like that take time and effort, especially when they need to work on a proprietary engine. That takes a while to train. 3) Just because Tencent invested in GGG, doesn't mean they can just swipe Daddy Tencent's CCP card however they want. Piling on more human resource stops making sense after a while.
Admittly, I'm the least certain about this point, so let me know if I got something wrong.
SSD:
SSDs improve loading time. A few people seem to have confused the benefit of a SSD because it does help with the occasional stutter when the game loads in syndicate members. At this point, a SSD is basically required for PoE to have a decent experience, but it won't help you with Blight maps.
System specs
Some quick points regarding your computer specs.
I often see in discussions where people list their specs to prove a point. However, the specs they give are something like "i7, gtx 2080", which doesn't really say anything about your computer. When you want to list your specs, get a program to scan your computer and outputs something like this
Even when you provide a complete list, we still don't know the other details. Is your computer thermal throttling because of a bad case/fan/cable management or high room temperature? Do you have habits like leaving 300+ hentai tabs on chrome at all times (and yes, I know someone IRL who does that)? Little things add up. I know it's unlikely, but it happens.
PoE is CPU bound, which means its performance is limited by your CPU more than your GPU. As GGG admitted in this post, the amount of enemies and the speed of the game mean there are simply too many calculations. You will know this if playing on Predictive gives you smoother frames than Lockstep, because the client has to wait for the server to calculate and send the results over. And on Lockstep, that means the client freezes. Like GGG said, this is due to gameplay design choices. Now if you want to say something like "well how about don't make something like Blight again", then I won't have an argument against it, because I don't know sh*t about game design.
And that is my last unpopular (aka probably popular) opinion: please don't throw in your 2 cents if you don't know anything about the topic, or at least preface it by "I'm not an expert but-". But I'm also just some random dude so what do I know.
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