Full Breakdown
Path of Exile 2’s Year-and-Half Quest to Fix Nvidia Driver Crashes
8/1/2026, 11:54:41 PM
Core Event – Nvidia Driver Bug Resolved
After more than 18 months of investigation, Grinding Gear Games (GGG) succeeded in eliminating the intermittent long-duration freezes that plagued high-end Nvidia GPU users in *Path of Exile 2*. The fix works by increasing the shader-heap size, which fully removes the previously observed “Device Removed” errors and the resulting 10-second freezes.
Background & Context
*Path of Exile 2* entered early-access with its first public patch in December 2025. From the outset, players with Nvidia graphics cards reported frequent shader-related crashes, especially on driver versions 566.36 and newer. The issue manifested as a hard crash on older builds and, in later updates, as a 10-second freeze accompanied by choppy performance after the GPU “device removed” error. Because the problem was tied to Nvidia’s proprietary driver, GGG could not resolve it through in-game patches alone.
Debugging Process – From Dark Shots to Full Replay
Initially, GGG’s engineers attempted blind, long-duration play sessions, hoping a crash would occur spontaneously. With no clear trigger, the team built a specialized replay system capable of recording and replaying hours of gameplay. After extensive trial and error, the replay could reproduce the freeze every five to seven minutes on average.
The reproducible session was packaged into a single folder that could be executed on any machine. To eliminate every variable, GGG shipped an entire PC—including monitor, keyboard, and mouse—to Nvidia’s engineering team, ensuring the exact hardware and software environment could be examined. Nvidia assigned a driver specialist, who traced the fault to an internal “shader heap size” parameter and implemented the increase that appears in driver 610.88.
Official Statements & Responses
After receiving the full replay package and hardware, Nvidia “looked into it” and returned with a driver fix a few weeks later. The driver release note explicitly references the *Path of Exile 2* pause issue, confirming the vendor’s acknowledgment of the problem.
Data & Statistics
- Crash reproduction interval: 5–7 minutes on average.
- Driver version addressing the issue: Nvidia Game Ready Driver 610.88.
- Early-access launch: December 2025.
- Duration of debugging effort: over 18 months (approximately a year and a half).
Impact & Outlook
The driver update removes the long freezes that disrupted end-game “blasting” sessions, restoring smooth performance for high-level players on Nvidia GPUs. GGG’s engine team can now refocus on routine performance optimizations ahead of the full 1.0 release slated for later this year. While the fix resolves the primary shader-heap problem, the game remains demanding on CPUs, and occasional minor stalls may still occur in particularly intensive scenarios.
Verbatim Quotes
- “You really are just taking shots in the dark at that point,” — Jonathan Rogers, game director
- “The saga is over and now our engine programmers can go back to optimizing some more normal performance problems,” — Jonathan Rogers, game director
