Nvidia Finally Fixes Path of Exile 2 GPU Shader Crash Bug After 18 Months

Path of Exile 2's developers, Grinding Gear Games, have finally convinced Nvidia to fix a long-standing driver bug that caused GPU shader crashes in the game. This issue had been ongoing for over a year and a half, with players experiencing freezes every 20 minutes or so.

According to Game Director Jonathan Rogers, Nvidia initially refused to take action without steps to recreate the problem. The devs eventually built a system to track useful data and created a specialized replay system that could play back long gameplay sessions for hours on PCs around the office.

The team was able to get the bug to happen consistently with replays, which they packaged into a file and shipped to Nvidia along with the specific rig it was running on. This included the PC, monitor, mouse, and keyboard.

Nvidia finally addressed the issue by increasing the shader heap size in their latest driver update, version 610.88, which was released this week.