If you’ve played Path of Exile 2, particularly if you’ve been grinding your way through the endgame, there’s a good chance you’ve run into crashes or temporary freezes where your gameplay briefly locks up, then reloads the area completely. It’s a problem that’s been persistently plaguing the action RPG “since the very first version of PoE 2,” with the potential to impact anyone using modern Nvidia drivers, and one that’s actually been getting worse for some over the course of its lifespan. Fortunately, Game Director Jonathan Rogers has some good news at last.
“I’m excited to say we finally have an update on the shader loading and ‘device removed’ problems that PoE 2 has been suffering from for ages now,” Rogers announces. By combining the latest Nvidia driver and a new Path of Exile 2 patch, you should find both of these issues to be “significantly improved.” After more than a year and a half of awkward interruptions to players’ endgame blasting, however, Grinding Gear Games isn’t settling on just sliding this out – it’s actually got some answers for why this took so long to fix.
If you use an Nvidia card you’ve probably run into the problem: the game screen freezes, typically for a second or two (but sometimes notably longer on certain systems), then hard cuts to the turning gears of the loading screen. This brings you back into the game where you were, but performance and framerate often continues to struggle for a while as shaders load back in. “For some players, this happens all the time while mapping,” Rogers remarks. If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid it, there’s an example of what it looks like at the 30-second mark in the video below.
Rogers explains that back around the time PoE 2 launched in December 2024, the problem “didn’t happen nearly as much,” but it was more severe, crashing the game entirely. After some testing, GGG realized it only affected Nvidia graphics that were on driver version 566.36 and newer. “Annoyingly, that’s the driver that came out just before PoE 2 came out,” he remarks. If you followed best protocols and ensured your drivers were updated before playing the new game, you’d actually be setting yourself up for failure.
The team went to Nvidia for support, but because the problem became notably more prevalent in endgame maps, “they just didn’t really seem to believe that it was as common as we said it was.” This left GGG to fix it themselves. “It was annoying, because the problem was both incredibly common, and yet very hard to reproduce reliably.” The only way to test for it was just to have people play the game until they ran into it, with “zero information about what caused it or what was happening at the time” to assist in debugging.
“You really are just taking shots in the dark at that point,” Rogers recalls. As a temporary solution, the team found a way to mitigate the issue: “Instead of crashing, how about we just don’t crash? That’s what you now see when you get a graphics driver crash.” Rather than kicking you out, the game frees all the textures and shaders, completely restarts the engine, and then reloads all of those resources back in so you can keep playing from where you were. It’s certainly an improvement, but remains a major irritation.
“For the frequency of crashes we had for this in the early days of PoE 2, this solution was pretty good,” Rogers continues. Not content to just leave it be, however, the team ramped up its debug tools and even developed a ‘replay’ system that would just let the game automatically play out the action on a PC without someone having to manually control it. Eventually, one particular session was found that would reproduce the issue “every five to seven minutes on average.” Bingo.
Not wanting any more variables, the team packaged up one of their machines – keyboard, mouse, and all – and sent it to Nvidia, who put an engineer on the case. “Around a month ago, they finally saw the problem with their own eyes.” Two weeks later, a solution was discovered: “Increasing an internal value called the ‘shader heap size’ caused the crash to go away, which is something that they can change just for our game.” After years of the issue gradually getting worse, instances of crashes plummeted down with the new Nvidia driver.
Alongside this, GGG has been working to reduce the size of its shaders. Rogers explains that the same driver causing issues at launch also removed the ability to automatically clear out a full shader cache, leading to much longer shader load times, and causing performance problems or missing textures as a result. Thanks to the new overhaul, you should be less likely to run into issues – although it’s worth noting you can check your shader cache size manually in the Nvidia app if you’re still encountering a problem.
Install Path of Exile 2 patch 9.5.4e and Nvidia GeForce Game Ready Driver version 610.88, and you should be on the road to much smoother sessions. Note that due to the redesign, you might run into longer load times initially as you re-encounter each new region and mechanic. “I can assure you that the process will restore you to a much better place than before after that process has finished.” With PoE 2’s 1.0 launch on the horizon, this news couldn’t have come at a much better time; I’m certain GGG is breathing a big sigh of relief.
