Grinding Gear Games, the developer of Path of Exile 2, helped resolve a game-breaking Nvidia driver bug by shipping the graphics company an entire PC setup capable of reproducing it. Despite the longstanding driver bug, Path of Exile 2 remains one of the most prominent action RPGs currently available in early access.
Path of Exile 2‘s disruptive Nvidia driver bug was first identified shortly after the early-access launch, reportedly causing lengthy pauses during extended gameplay sessions, leaving affected players unable to control their characters for around 20 to 30 seconds. The freezes were particularly bad during demanding endgame content, where suddenly losing control of the game could lead to a character’s death or a failed encounter. Grinding Gear Games eventually determined that the underlying problem involved newer Nvidia drivers, including version 566.36, which was released shortly before Path of Exile 2 entered early access. After approximately a year and a half of investigation, the problem has finally been addressed through a new Nvidia graphics driver update.
Path of Exile 2 Dev Ships Entire PC to Nvidia to Fix Major Bug
In a developer video uploaded to YouTube, game director Jonathan Rogers explained that Grinding Gear Games had identified the Nvidia driver code associated with the crashes much earlier in its investigation, but the graphics card company still needed reliable steps for reproducing the issue before it could investigate further. Asking the Nvidia engineers to repeatedly play Path of Exile 2‘s difficult endgame maps until the game froze was not considered a practical solution, especially because the bug could take hours to occur. Therefore, Grinding Gear Games added new diagnostic tools to its in-house engine and created a replay system capable of repeating recorded gameplay sessions across office computers. After plenty of testing, the development studio was able to produce a replay that triggered the problem roughly once every five to seven minutes.
Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.
Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.
Easy (5)Medium (7)Hard (10)
Even with all that effort, the replay only worked consistently on one machine in the Grinding Gear Games studio. Ultimately, the team packaged the recording alongside the affected PC and shipped the entire setup to Nvidia, including the monitor, keyboard, and mouse, just for good measure. With the exact hardware and replay in hand, Nvidia could consistently reproduce the failure and investigate a driver-level fix.
Nvidia determined that increasing the shader heap size prevented the underlying GPU crash, eliminating the prolonged recovery pauses that followed. The company applied the adjustment to Path of Exile 2 and rectified the issue as of GeForce Game Ready Driver 610.88, released on July 28, 2026. Nvidia’s patch notes state that the driver fixes intermittent long pauses that could occur after extended sessions when playing the game in DirectX12 mode. Grinding Gear Games celebrated the end of this saga by opening a bottle of champagne, while Rogers said the studio’s engine programmers could finally return to addressing more conventional performance problems now that this is all over.
While unusual and somewhat comedic, Path of Exile 2‘s endgame driver situation does illustrate why PC gaming problems involving specific combinations of software, drivers, and hardware can take so long to diagnose, even for a year and a half in this case. Grinding Gear Games knew that many players were encountering problems, but Nvidia lacked a consistently reproducible test case and required consistently reproducible examples before it could effectively investigate and implement a permanent fix, creating long-term friction that required some out-of-the-box thinking to resolve. Shipping an entire gaming setup may have been an extreme solution, but it ultimately fixed a stubborn Path of Exile 2 bug that conventional reports could not reliably demonstrate.
- Released
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December 6, 2024
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Blood and Gore, Nudity, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes, Language, Users Interact, In-Game Purchases (Includes Random Items)
