You are 40 minutes deep into a juiced endgame map. The loot is extraordinary. Then the game freezes. Thirty seconds of dread. When it comes back, your character is gone. If that sounds familiar, Path of Exile 2 players have been living this particular nightmare since the game’s early access launch — and as of this week, Grinding Gear Games has finally traced it back to its source.
The short version: it was an Nvidia driver bug. The longer version involves 18 months of debugging, Reddit threads full of desperate players, a game director’s candid admission that Nvidia simply did not believe GGG’s reports, and the studio eventually shipping an entire PC across the world to prove the problem was real.
Eighteen Months of Unexplained Crashes
The crashes, logged internally as a “Device Removed” error, began showing up as soon as Path of Exile 2 launched in early access. Players on Nvidia cards would hit a freeze mid-session, wait anywhere from several seconds to half a minute, then find the game rebuilding its graphics resources on the other side. At first the studio suspected its own engine. The bug was infuriatingly inconsistent, appearing under heavy load but never cleanly reproducible on command.
Narrowing it down further, GGG identified that the problem only affected Nvidia graphics cards running driver version 566.36 or later — the driver that was current at the time of launch. Older driver builds were clean. That pointed clearly toward Nvidia’s side of the fence, but pointing wasn’t the same as proving.
Why Nvidia Wouldn’t Take Their Word for It
Game director Jonathan Rogers laid out the saga in a video posted this week. The problem, he explained, was that the only reliable way to trigger the crash was to grind the game’s highest-tier endgame content for extended periods. You couldn’t hand Nvidia a clean reproduction script.
“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.” — Jonathan Rogers, Game Director, Grinding Gear Games
GGG’s initial approach was blunt: assign someone to sit and play the game for multiple hours until it crashed. “You really are just taking shots in the dark at that point,” Rogers admitted. The studio was dealing with a hardware vendor that needed reproducible steps and was looking at a bug that required two hours of top-tier gameplay just to manifest reliably.
The Fix: A Shipped PC and Driver 610.88
The breakthrough came when GGG shipped Nvidia a complete PC — their own hardware, configured exactly as affected players reported — so Nvidia’s engineers could see the crash with their own eyes. Once the problem was visible and reproducible in Nvidia’s own hands, an engineer was assigned to investigate it properly.
The root cause was a value inside the Nvidia driver called the shader heap size. Under certain conditions, when Path of Exile 2’s engine made specific demands on the GPU’s shader system, this value was too small — and the driver crashed. Critically, this is a setting that Nvidia can adjust per-game inside the driver profile, without requiring changes to the game itself.
The fix shipped on 28 July 2026 as GeForce Game Ready Driver 610.88. Alongside it, GGG released a game update that reduces the overall size of Path of Exile 2’s shaders, making the underlying condition less likely to hit the limit even before the driver is patched. Both fixes arriving together effectively ends the crash for the vast majority of affected players.
What to do: Update to Nvidia driver 610.88 and install the latest Path of Exile 2 patch. Expect longer load times on your first session — the shader cache is rebuilding. After that, performance should be noticeably better.
Longer Load Times First, Then Better Performance
One note for anyone updating today: because the game update changes how shaders are compiled, your existing cache will be cleared. The first time you load into new areas after patching, load times will be longer than usual. That is normal and expected — the game is rebuilding from scratch. Once done, GGG expects overall performance to settle into a better state than before the bug existed.
For players who were holding off on the current Path of Exile 2 season because of the crash issues, this removes the last major technical hurdle. The Nvidia driver bug was one of those problems that affected players heavily but quietly — the kind that doesn’t get fixed until a developer is stubborn enough to ship a whole computer across the world in the name of a clean repro.
