Path of Exile 2 studio shipped an entire PC to NVIDIA to fix driver crashes
© Path of Exile Grinding Gear Games says it has finally addressed two long-running NVIDIA-related problems in Path of Exile 2. The fixes cover the recurring “Device Removed” driver crashes and extended shader-loading delays. Game director Jonathan Rogers ended the technical explanation by declaring the saga over and opening a bottle of champagne.
The device removal problem has affected Path of Exile 2 since its earliest builds. It became more common with NVIDIA driver 566.36 and later releases. When the graphics driver crashed, the game could freeze for several seconds before displaying a loading screen and rebuilding its graphics resources. Performance could remain reduced while shaders continued compiling in the background.
© Grinding Gear Games NVIDIA needed a reliable reproduction
Grinding Gear Games says one engine programmer spent almost 18 months investigating the problem. The studio knew the issue only affected NVIDIA hardware, but NVIDIA required repeatable instructions that its engineers could follow. Asking engineers to play high-level maps for several hours was not considered a usable reproduction case.
The development team added debugging systems, collected engine metrics and created a replay system capable of repeating full gameplay sessions. This eventually reduced the reproduction time from several hours to roughly five to seven minutes. Since the issue still did not appear on every system, Grinding Gear Games shipped NVIDIA an entire affected PC, including its monitor, keyboard and mouse.
© Grinding Gear Games 
© Grinding Gear Games NVIDIA reproduced the problem and assigned a driver engineer to investigate it. The company found that increasing an internal shader heap size stopped the crashes. NVIDIA can apply this adjustment specifically to Path of Exile 2 through its driver profile. The change is included with GeForce Game Ready Driver 610.88 , released on July 28. NVIDIA describes the correction as a fix for intermittent long pauses after extended gameplay sessions.
Shader cache changes reduce loading delays
The accompanying Path of Exile 2 update also reduces shader sizes. The game compiles visible shaders during loading screens and processes other shaders in the background. Grinding Gear Games says NVIDIA’s shader cache could fill up because the driver version associated with the crashes also stopped automatically removing old unused entries. The game had no way to detect that new shaders were no longer being stored.
© Grinding Gear Games Installing the new game update or NVIDIA driver will clear older shaders, so players may experience longer loading times while content is compiled again. Grinding Gear Games expects performance to improve after the cache has been rebuilt. Rogers concluded the video by saying the engine programmers could return to other performance work before opening the champagne.
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