Path of Exile 2 Freeze Bug Finally Fixed After Year-Long Hunt
The fix ends a roughly year-and-a-half investigation that required the developers to build a dedicated replay system and ship a full test PC setup to NVIDIA before the driver vendor assigned an engineer.
Reporting from 1 source: Automaton.
Path of Exile 2 director Jonathan Rogers reported on July 30 that two long-standing technical issues have been dramatically improved. The 'Device Removed' bug, which froze gameplay when the graphics driver crashed, has been traced to specific NVIDIA drivers. A new driver plus patch 0.5.4e resolves it, and shader compile times are also being reduced.
The 'Device Removed' bug had been reported since the early access launch on December 7, 2024, but was hard to reproduce. The team added debug info and found it only affected users on NVIDIA's GeForce Game Ready driver 566.36 or later. NVIDIA would not respond without a reliable reproduction, so the developers made random engine changes, played for hours, and built a custom replay system to force crashes.
Once they could reproduce it consistently, they sent the test PC, monitor, mouse, and keyboard to NVIDIA, which then assigned a driver engineer. The cause was an internal value called shader heap size. Increasing it stopped the crashes, and the new GeForce Game Ready driver 610.88 includes a setting for the game. Combined with patch 0.5.4e, the improvement is dramatic.
The same driver version had also removed a feature that auto-deleted old unused shaders, causing longer load times and missing objects. The team reduced shader sizes to lower the risk. Rogers said engine programmers can now return to normal optimization work, and the team opened champagne to celebrate.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.