Renderer Stability and Visual Quality in POE 2 — Ongoing Vulkan and DX12 Issues

To the Development Team,
I’m writing this as a long-time ARPG player and recent POE 2 tester who has spent considerable time optimizing performance under the current early access build. My system is a modern, well-balanced rig running:

Ryzen 5 7600X

Radeon RX 7800 XT

32GB DDR5 RAM

NVMe SSD

Running at native 1440p with frame cap set to 72 FPS

Despite tuning every possible aspect—core parking, frame capping, shader cache, launch parameters, and system prioritization—I am still forced to choose between stable performance and visual clarity due to the current state of the rendering options.

Vulkan Performance: Smooth but Visually Broken
Vulkan is the only renderer that allows me to play juiced content like Breach and Delirium without consistent stuttering or frame collapses. However, it presents serious visual artifacts in multiple situations, particularly:

Blocky, grid-like shadow tiling in fog-heavy tilesets (e.g. Steaming Springs, Steppe, Felled Hideout)

Lighting banding and visible render tile transitions

Degraded visual clarity during movement in mist or global illumination-like scenes

These artifacts are persistent even with post-processing disabled and are especially prominent on RDNA3 hardware like the RX 7800 XT. While gameplay remains technically stable, it comes at the cost of serious visual immersion issues.

DX12 Performance: Clean Visuals, Severe Instability
In contrast, DX12 produces clean, artifact-free visuals with correct lighting and shadow rendering. However, it causes:

Significant frame drops and frametime spikes, especially during map loading, town scenes, and high-density content

Stuttering that worsens during particle-heavy encounters

Occasional crashes or failure to recover from loading sequences

This has been consistently reproducible post–Dawn of the Hunt patch, and many other users have reported similar regressions.

The Core Issue: There Is No Reliable Renderer Right Now
Players on capable systems are currently forced to choose between:

A renderer that plays well but looks broken (Vulkan)

A renderer that looks great but plays poorly or not at all (DX12)

This is not a viable long-term compromise, particularly for those of us engaging with high-end content. While early access implies ongoing iteration, the rendering pipeline is foundational to gameplay and should be treated as a development priority.

Request
Please consider prioritizing the following:

Vulkan fixes for RDNA visual artifacts (shadow tiling, fog grid lines, lighting errors)

DX12 stability improvements (thread scheduling, crash reduction, frame pacing fixes)

Documentation or communication on what players can expect regarding render optimization moving forward

I appreciate the complexity of game development and the iterative nature of engine work, but rendering quality and stability are not peripheral issues—they define whether or not the game feels complete.

Thank you for your time and continued work on the game. I’m very much looking forward to seeing these systems improve over the coming patches.

Sincerely,
A POE 2 early access player and technical tester