PoE 2 Devs Shipped Nvidia an Entire PC to Prove a Bug

"PC, monitor, hell, we even put the mouse and keyboard in there." That's Path of Exile 2 game director Jonathan Rogers describing the lengths Grinding Gear Games went to in order to convince Nvidia that a driver bug was real. Not an email. Not a bug report. An entire physical computer, packaged in a box and shipped to Nvidia's offices, running a replay that would trigger the crash every five to seven minutes.

The bug in question has been haunting PoE 2 players since the game launched into early access in December 2024. Anyone running Nvidia driver version 566.36 or newer, which happened to release just before the game did, was susceptible to a "device removed" crash that would freeze the screen, cut to a loading screen, and tank performance as shaders reloaded. For endgame players grinding high-tier maps, it was happening constantly. Some players reported freezes every 20 minutes.

Grinding Gear Games identified early on that the problem only affected Nvidia cards on those newer drivers. The natural next step was to contact Nvidia. But as Rogers explained in a video posted this week, Nvidia's process requires solid reproduction steps before it will investigate, and "those steps unfortunately can't be 'just grind to top tier juiced maps.'"

"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."

So GGG was left to solve someone else's problem. The team built a workaround: instead of crashing to desktop, the game would silently restart its entire rendering engine, free all textures and shaders, and reload everything while keeping the player in-game. It turned a hard crash into a jarring freeze followed by degraded performance. Better than losing your character in a dangerous map, but still miserable.

Eighteen months of shots in the dark

The real detective work started when GGG refused to accept the workaround as permanent. The team built custom debug tools and a replay system that could automatically play back long gameplay sessions without human input, running on PCs around the office for hours. After months of iteration, they found a specific replay that reproduced the crash every five to seven minutes on average.

That was the breakthrough. GGG packaged the replay file onto the rig it was running on, boxed up the whole setup, and shipped it to Nvidia. Then they waited. About a month later, Nvidia finally saw the crash with their own eyes and assigned a driver engineer to investigate. Two weeks after that, the engineer found the fix: increasing an internal value called the "shader heap size" eliminated the crashes entirely. Nvidia could apply this change specifically for Path of Exile 2 through a driver update.

The fix shipped this week in Nvidia Game Ready Driver 610.88, with the patch note reading: "Path of Exile 2: Fixed intermittent long pauses that could occur after extended gameplay sessions in DX12 mode." One line. A year and a half of work from GGG's engine team, condensed into a single bullet point in someone else's changelog.

There was a second issue tangled up in all of this. The same driver version that introduced the crash also broke Nvidia's automatic shader cache management, meaning PoE 2's shader cache folders would fill up and stop accepting new entries. Players experienced this as long load times, missing textures, and visual bugs. GGG couldn't fix Nvidia's cache behaviour directly, but the team reduced the file size of its shaders so the cache fills up more slowly. Combined with the driver update, both problems should now be resolved for most players.

I've written about GGG's communication before when covering their maintenance patches, and this is exactly why I keep pointing to them as a studio that does transparency right. Rogers didn't just say "we fixed it." He explained what caused it, why it took so long, who was responsible, and what the actual technical solution was. He popped a bottle of champagne on camera. Compare that to the studios that ship "stability improvements" and call it a day.

The story also says something less flattering about how GPU manufacturers handle bug reports from game developers. GGG identified the exact driver version causing the problem, told Nvidia it was affecting a huge portion of their endgame playerbase, and was met with skepticism. The studio had to physically mail hardware to prove the bug existed. I love that GGG went to those lengths, but their having to do so is absurd. Path of Exile 2 isn't some obscure indie title; it's one of the biggest ARPGs on the market with a massive concurrent player base.

Path of Exile 2 remains in early access and is expected to hit 1.0 later this year. With this fix in place, Rogers said the engine team can finally go back to working on regular performance optimisation instead of chasing a bug that was never theirs to begin with.