As Path of Exile 2 is still an Early Access game , issues of all sorts are expected to be in. Although Grinding Gear Games is doing an excellent job addressing most issues, two of the most critical issues - a "device removed" crashing issue and severe shader loading stutter - were left unaddressed until a recent game update and new NVIDIA driver 610.88 update . Admittedly, the long time required to fix these issues isn't on the developer, but on NVIDIA , which required an entire PC to be shipped to them before it would take action on an issue it believed wasn't common enough to warrant action .
"As part of that investigation, we found out that it only affected NVIDIA graphics cards, and then it only affected people using the driver version 566.36 and newer. Annoyingly, that's the driver that came out just before POE 2 came out," Game Director Jonathan Rogers explained in a recent video .
Getting in touch with NVIDIA to address this Path of Exile 2 crashing issue wasn't enough, apparently. "So just contact NVIDIA, right? Well, it's not so easy. NVIDIA will only help you if you can give them solid reproduction steps... 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," Rogers said. "We decided to take one of our computers that reproduced the problem and ship it to NVIDIA - PC, monitor, hell, we even put the mouse and keyboard in there... We put the whole damn setup in a box, we sent it to them, and we waited... around a month ago, they finally saw the problem with their own eyes and assigned a driver engineer to look into it."
The shader loading stuttering issue , which got significant in some scenarios , also required NVIDIA's intervention . "Around two weeks ago, they noticed that increasing an internal value called the shader heap size caused the crash to go away, which is something that they can change just for our game," the Path of Exile 2 director said.
With both the latest NVIDIA driver and the latest game update , both issues have finally been addressed , allowing players playing with NVIDIA cards to enjoy Path of Exile 2 with no issues . And there's quite a bit to enjoy right now in the game, even if it's still in Early Access . With the Return of the Ancients patc h released back in May, Grinding Gear Games added over 50 hours of new endgame content , 15 new bosses , 2 new Ascendancy classes and more .
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