Grinding Gear Games is calling on Spock to help deal with some technical issues in Path of Exile. No, wait — he’s a Vulcan, and GGG is utilizing Vulkan, a new renderer that will provide “more consistent performance than the DirectX 11 one, especially when under high CPU load.” But can it do that nifty hand signal?
You can opt into the Vulkan beta by selecting it from the Graphics Options screen under Renderer. It “will not magically make your graphics card perform better,” but it should make for less stuttering and stalling, overall making “performance a lot more consistent.” The key is that it gives PoE full control over how resources are managed and thus allowing the game to better utilize your hardware according to its specific requirements.
Vulkan is actually a little slower than DirectX 11 at the moment, but it’s something the team hopes to get sorted out by the time the upcoming expansion launches next month. You can read the technical details about driver processing and multithreading and dynamic shaders on the PoE site.