Path of Exile 2 Director Says Devs Had to Ship an Entire PC to Nvidia to Fix 18-Month Driver Bug

Players of Path of Exile 2 who struggled with random freezes and GPU crashes may finally have relief. After nearly 18 months of investigation, developer Grinding Gear Games (GGG) has confirmed that Nvidia has released a driver update addressing the long-standing issue that affected many players during extended gameplay sessions.

The fix arrives with Nvidia Game Ready Driver 610.88, ending what GGG’s developers described as an unusually complex debugging process that required custom engineering tools, replay systems, and even sending an entire PC setup to Nvidia so the company could reproduce the problem.

Grinding Gear Games Tracked the Problem for More Than a Year

In a recently published developer update, Path of Exile 2 game director Jonathan Rogers explained that identifying the source of the crashes proved far more difficult than initially expected. Although GGG determined that the issue originated in Nvidia’s graphics driver, proving it required consistently reproducing the bug.

Rogers explained:

“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.”

According to Rogers, Nvidia required a reliable method to reproduce the problem before investigating it further. Simply telling engineers that crashes occurred after hours of high-end gameplay was not enough.

“Those steps unfortunately can’t be ‘just grind to top tier juiced maps,'”

Rogers said.

Custom Replay System Helped Recreate the GPU Crash

Initially, the development team attempted to reproduce the crashes by manually playing the game for hours, hoping the issue would eventually appear. Rogers admitted the approach offered little consistency.

“You really are just taking shots in the dark at that point.”

Rather than giving up, GGG expanded its internal engine tools by adding detailed diagnostic tracking and developing an advanced replay system capable of replaying lengthy gameplay sessions automatically across multiple office computers.

The breakthrough came when the replay consistently triggered the crash every five to seven minutes.

Rogers revealed that the team packaged the replay together with the exact hardware responsible for reproducing the issue.

“We took that replay… and shipped the specific rig it was running on to Nvidia—PC, monitor, hell, we even put the mouse and keyboard in there.”

The unusual step ensured Nvidia engineers were working with the identical environment where the bug occurred.

Nvidia Driver 610.88 Eliminates the Shader Crash Issue

After receiving the complete system, Nvidia successfully identified the underlying problem. According to Rogers, increasing the shader heap size eliminated the crashes entirely.

Earlier this week, Nvidia officially released Game Ready Driver 610.88, whose release notes include:

“Path of Exile 2: Fixed intermittent long pauses that could occur after extended gameplay sessions in DX12 mode.”

Following the successful fix, Rogers celebrated the milestone, saying:

“The saga is over and now our engine programmers can go back to optimizing some more normal performance problems.”

The update is expected to significantly improve stability for players using DirectX 12, particularly those who experienced freezes during long play sessions. With Path of Exile 2 continuing through Early Access ahead of its planned 1.0 launch later this year, resolving one of the game’s most persistent technical issues marks an important milestone for both Grinding Gear Games and Nvidia.