Grinding Gear Games has finally squashed the long-running GPU shader crash that has plagued Path of Exile 2 since early access, and the fix arrived this week after the studio literally shipped Nvidia an entire PC to prove the bug was real. The result landed in the NVIDIA Game Ready Driver 610.88, which specifically calls out a fix for the game.
We've seen developers go to great lengths to chase down a nasty crash, but this one is hilarious. An 18-month troubleshooting marathon that ended with a bottle of champagne and my precious experience bar no longer going down as the game recovers during periodic crashing.
What was actually going wrong?
If you played through a recent league, you've almost certainly experienced this.
Players reported the entire game freezing every 20-40 minutes, locking up for a solid 30 seconds before the game recovers and things are happening again. Dozens of Reddit threads and YouTube videos have documented the same intermittent freezes and crashes going back to the game's early access launch, and the only workaround was swapping a setting that made the game look considerably worse, or switching to Vulkan which provides lower FPS.
Under the hood, those freezes were the GPU crashing. The game would then reload the textures, shaders, and entire engine without fully closing down which is why everything came back after a lengthy pause instead of dropping you to the desktop.
Why wouldn't Nvidia just fix it?
Here's the frustrating part. Even after GGG identified the exact Nvidia driver code responsible, the fix wasn't straightforward. Game director Jonathan Rogers explained in the recent video that Nvidia wouldn't act without reliable, repeatable steps to recreate the issue - and "just grind to top tier juiced maps" apparently doesn't cut it as a bug report.
Quote From Jonathan Rogers Even though ultimately this is a bug in the Nvidia driver and it affected a huge number of high level players, quite frankly, they just didn't really seem to believe that it was as common as we said it was.
The studio started the old-fashioned way, having someone play the game for hours hoping it would eventually crash. With no real clues, Rogers described the process as taking shots in the dark.
How did they finally catch it?
The team first built a system to at least stop the game from hard-crashing - the mechanism behind those long reloads rather than full closures. Rogers called the workaround "pretty good," but the team was still determined to find the real cause, going down what he called an incredibly deep rabbit hole to reproduce it.
To get there, GGG did the following:
Added a bunch of ways for the game engine to track useful diagnostic data.
Built a specialized replay system that could play back long gameplay sessions for hours on PCs around the office.
Kept refining until they had a replay that reproduced the crash every five to seven minutes on average.
Once they had a replay that reliably triggered the bug, they packaged it into a file that could run it again - and then shipped the exact rig it was running on to Nvidia. As Rogers put it, they sent the "PC, monitor, hell, we even put the mouse and keyboard in there."
What was the fix?
It took some time, but Nvidia eventually got back to GGG saying it would look into the problem, and came back a few weeks later with a solution: increasing the shader heap size made the crashes go away completely. That fix shipped this week in the NVIDIA Game Ready Driver 610.88, with the release note reading: "Path of Exile 2: Fixed intermittent long pauses that could occur after extended gameplay sessions in DX12 mode."
With the war finally won, Rogers said the engine team can now get back to more normal performance optimization work - and he celebrated by popping open a bottle of champagne.
Have you been hit by the Path of Exile 2 freezes? Let us know in the comments whether the new driver cleared them up for you.
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