There was a point in the most recent Path of Exile 2 league that I thought I would have to quit playing the game. Every 20 minutes or so, the entire game would freeze. I’d wait for a solid 30 seconds before everything came back to life, praying I wouldn’t lose my character the second I had control again.
When I looked up why this could be happening, I found dozens of Reddit threads about the same issue. People have been suffering from intermittent freezes and crashes since the game launched in early access and the only solution was to swap a setting that made it look considerably worse until developer Grinding Gear Games figured out a solution.
It turns out the freezes were just the first part of a troubleshooting saga that the developers have been on for the last year and a half. As of this week, the war against Path of Exile 2’s constant GPU shader crashes is finally over thanks to a mountain of effort GGG put into diagnosing them.
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Despite identifying the exact Nvidia driver code that caused it, game director Jonathan Rogers explained in a recent video that the graphics company won’t fix anything unless you provide it with the steps to recreate it. “And those steps unfortunately can’t be ‘Just grind to top tier juiced maps,’ he said.
“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,” he explained.
GGG started by having someone just play the game for multiple hours hoping it would eventually crash. But with no real clues on what could be causing it, this was a crapshoot. “You really are just taking shots in the dark at that point,” Rogers said.
After making no progress toward a solution, the dev team decided to build a system to at least prevent the game from crashing. The freezes I, and many others, experienced were the result of the GPU crashing and the game reloading the textures, shaders, and entire engine without closing down.
Rogers said the solution was “pretty good” but that they were still determined to figure out what was actually causing it. “So we went down an incredibly deep rabbit hole of trying to reproduce it,” he said. GGG added a bunch of ways for the game engine to track useful data and a specialized replay system that could play back long gameplay sessions for hours on PCs around the office.
“Eventually with the replays and an incredible amount of work from our engine team, we managed to get it to happen fairly consistently,” he said. “We got a replay that would reproduce it every five to seven minutes on average.”
They took that replay, packaged into a file you could use to run it again, and shipped the specific rig it was running on to Nvidia—”PC, monitor, hell, we even put the mouse and keyboard in there.”
It took some time, but Nvidia finally got back to them and said it would look into it. It came back a few weeks later with a fix: by increasing the shader heap size, the crashes would go away completely. And earlier this week, the NVIDIA Game Ready Driver 610.88 was released with this note: “Path of Exile 2: Fixed intermittent long pauses that could occur after extended gameplay sessions in DX12 mode.”
“The saga is over and now our engine programmers can go back to optimizing some more normal performance problems,” Rogers said, before popping open a bottle of champagne in celebration.
I would be celebrating too if it took almost two years to solve a problem that wasn’t even your own fault really. There’s nothing worse than being surrounded by dangerous monsters—or looking at a pile of valuable loot—and having the game go unresponsive for a solid 20 seconds. Fingers crossed that no other bugs will show up so everyone can have a smooth experience when it hits 1.0 later this year.
