Grinding Gear Games resolved a persistent, game-breaking crash in Path of Exile 2 by physically shipping an entire PC setup to NVIDIA after spending roughly a year and a half investigating the issue.
Quick Facts
- Game: Path of Exile 2
- Platform: PC
- Affected Hardware: NVIDIA graphics cards
- Resolved In: NVIDIA driver version 610.88
How the Graphics Driver Bug Was Solved
The graphics driver issue affected a large number of high-level players using NVIDIA hardware. According to PoE2 director Jonathan Rogers, the crash proved extremely difficult to reproduce reliably on standard developer rigs, leading to skepticism from NVIDIA regarding how common the problem was.
To overcome the hurdle, Grinding Gear Games built a replay system capable of triggering the crash every five to seven minutes on one specific machine. Rather than relying solely on remote logs, the studio packaged the replay folder and shipped the complete hardware setup to NVIDIA.
“We decided to take one of our computers that reproduced the problem and ship it to NVIDIA,” Rogers said. “PC, monitor, hell, we even put the mouse and keyboard in there. We didn’t want to leave a single variable to chance.”
Player Action and Current Status
Roughly a month after receiving the machine, NVIDIA assigned a driver engineer to investigate the setup. Two weeks later, the engineer identified an internal shader heap size setting that eliminated the crashes.
Players experiencing freezing or crashing on PC are advised to install NVIDIA driver version 610.88 alongside the latest Path of Exile 2 update. According to the developers, both the crashing issue and shader loading problems have been significantly improved.