Path of Exile 2 game director Jonathan Rogers has not been entirely honest with the performance improvements of Grinding Gear Games’ upcoming update. While official marketing for the new Last of the Druids update has promised fans a 25% improvement in performance, Rogers reveals that he’s personally seeing much grander gains on his personal PC rig.

Speaking to FRVR ahead of the new update’s grand reveal, we asked the game director about the under-the-hood improvements that the team have been working on. While fans likely won’t notice every minor improvement the team has made to the hectic ARPG, improving average framerates and stability is a core part of the game’s upcoming update.

“There are giant technical improvements we’ve made that I really hope players notice,” Rogers said. “We’ve worked a huge amount, even myself personally, on making sure that performance is much better in 0.4.0.”

“In particular as well, we’ve also improved a lot of the spikiness that you get. especially in the endgame.”

PoE 2 Game Director Jonathan Rogers

Rogers explained that the promise of a 25% performance gain should be true of every rig, but when PC gaming is involved, it’s more complicated to hone down a specific number for every player. “It’s really hard to promise specific things because, you know, no matter what you do, you can find someone who’s got some random hardware problem for whatever reason it makes the game slower than it was last update,” he explained.

Nevertheless, Rogers revealed that, on his personal rig, Path of Exile 2 0.4.0 runs significantly better than the last major update. “I can certainly tell you that, for me, performance is at least 50% higher. I said 25% in the video to hedge my bets. But for me, it’s like 50% or more higher.”

Rogers told us that performance is “a lot faster”, but performance will also be less unstable with significantly less peaks and troughs in your performance chart. “In particular as well, we’ve also improved a lot of the spikiness that you get. especially in the endgame,” he said.

However, it’s worth noting that players are not promised a flawless 60fps at all times. Path of Exile 2 is a vast game with a low of calculations and a lot of effects going on as you dive further into the game, and there are still further optimisations to be made as Grinding Gear Games continues on its journey to 1.0.

“[Performance] won’t be like fixed fixed [with this update].” Rogers told us. “Like, it’s not going to be like ‘everyone is always getting 60fps all the time no matter what you do’ kind of thing, which is the point I want to get to. I can tell you it’s way better and a lot more people will be at the point where they never see frame drops anymore. And then it’s more about, you know, the more crazy builds, the lower-end hard things like that, we also have problems. it’s way better than it was.”

Path of Exile 2 has come a long way since its initial early access launch, but there’s still a lot more to do. With Grinding Gear Games supporting both the sequel and continued updates/expansions for the original, the studio is dominating the ARPG genre, and there’s years of additional content in store for fans of both games.