Lag spikes to 200-300ms every minute or so. FPS is fine.

First and fore: Please, please, please do not conflate or confuse this with a GPU/CPU deficiency. This is network latency. Frame drops are NOT network latency.

This is an issue that has happened from Day One, but only to me. My partner who is:
- in the same house
- in the same room
- on the same wireless network
- on the same client (Steam)
- using a matching laptop (Lenovo Legion 5)

does not experience this network latency spiking every minute or two. If we're trying to play together, it only affects me. If I'm the only one playing, it still affects me, so it's not competition for network resources or bandwidth. If it was, either we'd both get the same kind of latency spikes, or it wouldn't be limited to just me; we'd have moments where one or the other of us saw this.

It's not CPU, GPU, any of that--this affects my desktop and my laptop, in equal amount, with the former being a 3070Ti and R5-5600X, and the latter being 4070 with R7-7745HX. Both rigs can maintain FPS and do so even when the latency hits: Models freeze on screen, but the camera is still panning smoothly. It's visibly not stuttering in terms of FPS.

Just to try and be thorough, I nuked all my settings from orbit and tried playing at the bare minimum resolution with all possible effects turned to minimum. As I expected, this did not impact the network latency every couple of minutes.

I even tried patently dumb things like connecting to other servers regardless of distance (DC, Texas, Cali, East Canada, Australia because why not at this point?) or using a VPN to a point near those servers and connecting that way (this actually solved some FFXIV latency I was experiencing a couple years back, which turned out to be ISP-related). The latency spikes remained.

I was initially given an EGS key for the game. I have experienced this issue exactly on both Steam and EGS platforms, so that's not a factor.

There's another thread about this sort of issue which I posted in, but it's overloaded with complaints about FPS drops. This is not an FPS drop.

This is rendering the game unplayable; I have not been able to get to the end of the first act--meaning it's got nothing to do with the number of things on the field at a given time.

I am not the only one with this issue, evidenced by https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3597548, the other thread with 133 pages of replies. I am desperately hoping this gets some visibility and some resolution.