Path of Exile 2 players faced a game-breaking crash that made high-level content unplayable for weeks. The issue forced Grinding Gear Games to take extreme measures to get Nvidia to fix the underlying driver bug. We watched the studio ship an entire computer setup to Nvidia to eliminate any doubt about the cause. This unusual step highlights how driver instability can halt a major game launch.
Studio sends full setup to GPU maker to resolve shader heap bug
The crash appeared in Nvidia driver versions 566.36 and newer. It struck high-level players repeatedly, often returning every five to seven minutes during gameplay. Jonathan Rogers, a representative for Grinding Gear Games, confirmed the bug affected a huge number of users. The studio built a replay system to reproduce the crash on a specific machine for testing.
Grinding Gear Games decided to ship a complete PC setup to Nvidia. Rogers said, "We decided to take one of our computers that reproduced the problem and ship it to Nvidia. PC, monitor, hell, we even put the mouse and keyboard in there. We didn't want to leave a single variable to chance." Nvidia reproduced the issue a month after receiving the hardware and assigned a driver engineer to the case.
Nvidia released driver version 610.88 to resolve the problem. The update fixes the crash by adjusting an internal shader heap size setting. This specific configuration change eliminated the instability that plagued the game. Players can now update their drivers to play without interruption.
We looked at the last Path of Exile 2 update while tracking these stability themes. The new driver release addresses the core technical failure that disrupted the game. The fix is now available to all users with compatible Nvidia hardware.
Source: DEXERTO
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