PoE 2.0.4 – Frame-time spikes, UI flicker, and color shifts even while idle. Occasional crashes.

System:
RTX 5080 (16 GB VRAM)
Ryzen 7 9800X3D
Samsung 9100 NVMe SSD
Windows 11

Drivers / Rendering Tests:
NVIDIA:
Latest NVIDIA driver tested
Previous NVIDIA driver tested (clean installs)
AMD:
Tested AMD Adrenalin 25.9.1 after previously being on the newest AMD driver
Renderers tested: DX12 and Vulkan
Upscalers tested: DLSS, FSR, and no upscaling

Symptoms:
Guild UI consistently causes UI flicker and global color/gamma changes

Short but severe freeze-lags (frame stalls), not gradual FPS drops
Freeze-lags occur even when idle in hideout

Changing upscalers, renderers, or GPU drivers does not eliminate the issue (only minor behavior differences)

Performance metrics during freezes (PoE in-game overlay):
CPU frame time: ~2 ms
GPU frame time: ~3 ms
VRAM usage: ~5–7 GB (well below GPU limit)
System RAM usage: ~2–3 GB
Disk activity: 0–3 MB/s
Network latency: ~17 ms (stable)

Despite low CPU/GPU frame times, low VRAM usage, and minimal disk activity on a high-speed NVMe SSD, the frame-time graph shows sharp red spikes that result in visible freezes.

What this rules out:
Not VRAM exhaustion
Not disk or asset streaming (Samsung 9100 NVMe, disk idle during stalls)
Not shader compilation from disk
Not network-related
Not GPU driver specific (both NVIDIA drivers and AMD Adrenalin 25.9.1 tested)
Not hardware-related

Conclusion: This appears to be an engine-level regression introduced in 0.4, likely related to UI/state rebuilds and post-processing or color pipeline synchronization causing main-thread stalls.
The issue is reproducible while idle and is triggered more often by UI interaction (especially Guild UI). There is currently no client-side workaround that fully resolves it.

Posting for visibility and investigation.

Me and buddy are also having similar issues, along with lots of global chat...

To remove some of the global and trade chat lag you can type /global 28373
/trade 82483 (some random numbers) will remove alot of the lag. But not solve the guild UI bug