In case you’ve performed Path of Exile 2, notably when you’ve been grinding your means by way of the endgame, there is a good likelihood you have run into crashes or non permanent freezes the place your gameplay briefly locks up, then reloads the world fully. It is an issue that is been persistently plaguing the motion RPG “for the reason that very first model of PoE 2,” with the potential to affect anybody utilizing trendy Nvidia drivers, and one which’s really been getting worse for some over the course of its lifespan. Thankfully, Sport Director Jonathan Rogers has some excellent news finally.
“I am excited to say we lastly have an replace on the shader loading and ‘system eliminated’ issues that PoE 2 has been affected by for ages now,” Rogers declares. By combining the newest Nvidia driver and a brand new Path of Exile 2 patch, you must discover each of those points to be “considerably improved.” After greater than a 12 months and a half of awkward interruptions to gamers’ endgame blasting, nevertheless, Grinding Gear Video games is not selecting simply sliding this out – it is really obtained some solutions for why this took so lengthy to repair.
In case you use an Nvidia card you have most likely run into the issue: the sport display screen freezes, sometimes for a second or two (however typically notably longer on sure methods), then arduous cuts to the turning gears of the loading display screen. This brings you again into the sport the place you have been, however efficiency and framerate usually continues to wrestle for some time as shaders load again in. “For some gamers, this occurs on a regular basis whereas mapping,” Rogers remarks. In case you’ve been fortunate sufficient to keep away from it, there’s an instance of what it seems like on the 30-second mark within the video beneath.
Rogers explains that again across the time PoE 2 launched in December 2024, the issue “did not occur practically as a lot,” however it was extra extreme, crashing the sport solely. After some testing, GGG realized it solely affected Nvidia graphics that have been on driver model 566.36 and newer. “Annoyingly, that is the driving force that got here out simply earlier than PoE 2 got here out,” he remarks. In case you adopted finest protocols and ensured your drivers have been up to date earlier than enjoying the brand new recreation, you’d really be setting your self up for failure.
The workforce went to Nvidia for help, however as a result of the issue turned notably extra prevalent in endgame maps, “they simply did not actually appear to imagine that it was as frequent as we mentioned it was.” This left GGG to repair it themselves. “It was annoying, as a result of the issue was each extremely frequent, and but very arduous to breed reliably.” The one option to check for it was simply to have folks play the sport till they bumped into it, with “zero details about what brought about it or what was occurring on the time” to help in debugging.
“You actually are simply taking pictures at the hours of darkness at that time,” Rogers recollects. As a brief resolution, the workforce discovered a option to mitigate the difficulty: “As an alternative of crashing, how about we simply do not crash? That is what you now see if you get a graphics driver crash.” Quite than kicking you out, the sport frees all of the textures and shaders, fully restarts the engine, after which reloads all of these assets again in so you may preserve enjoying from the place you have been. It is actually an enchancment, however stays a significant irritation.
“For the frequency of crashes we had for this within the early days of PoE 2, this resolution was fairly good,” Rogers continues. Not content material to simply go away it’s, nevertheless, the workforce ramped up its debug instruments and even developed a ‘replay’ system that will simply let the sport robotically play out the motion on a PC with out somebody having to manually management it. Finally, one explicit session was discovered that will reproduce the difficulty “each 5 to seven minutes on common.” Bingo.
Not wanting any extra variables, the workforce packaged up one in all their machines – keyboard, mouse, and all – and despatched it to Nvidia, who put an engineer on the case. “Round a month in the past, they lastly noticed the issue with their very own eyes.” Two weeks later, an answer was found: “Rising an inside worth referred to as the ‘shader heap dimension’ brought about the crash to go away, which is one thing that they will change only for our recreation.” After years of the difficulty steadily getting worse, cases of crashes plummeted down with the brand new Nvidia driver.
Alongside this, GGG has been working to scale back the scale of its shaders. Rogers explains that the identical driver inflicting points at launch additionally eliminated the power to robotically filter a full shader cache, resulting in for much longer shader load instances, and inflicting efficiency issues or lacking textures because of this. Due to the brand new overhaul, you have to be much less prone to run into points – though it is value noting you may examine your shader cache dimension manually within the Nvidia app when you’re nonetheless encountering an issue.
Set up Path of Exile 2 patch 9.5.4e and Nvidia GeForce Sport Prepared Driver model 610.88, and you have to be on the highway to a lot smoother periods. Observe that as a result of redesign, you may run into longer load instances initially as you re-encounter every new area and mechanic. “I can guarantee you that the method will restore you to a a lot better place than earlier than after that course of has completed.” With PoE 2’s 1.0 launch on the horizon, this information could not have come at a a lot better time; I am sure GGG is respiration a giant sigh of reduction.
