Nvidia has fixed the graphics driver bug behind the long freezes that have interrupted extended Path of Exile 2 sessions since the action RPG entered early access. The fix shipped this week in Game Ready Driver 610.88, ending a debugging effort that developer Grinding Gear Games says ran for about a year and a half.
The symptom was familiar to high-level players: the game would lock up for tens of seconds at a time, with the only reliable workaround being a graphics setting that made the game look considerably worse. What players experienced as a freeze was the GPU crashing outright, after which the game reloaded its textures, shaders, and engine without shutting down — a recovery system GGG built while the underlying cause was still unidentified.
Game director Jonathan Rogers said in a recent video that the studio had pinned down the exact Nvidia driver code responsible, but could not get it addressed without supplying reproduction steps — and, as he put it, those steps could not simply be to grind to top-tier juiced maps.
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.
Building a crash on demand
The first approach — putting someone on the game for hours and waiting for it to fall over — produced nothing usable, which Rogers described as taking shots in the dark. With no progress toward a root cause, the team first built the crash-recovery system so the game would survive the fault, then went back to reproducing it. GGG added instrumentation so the engine could record more data during play, and built a replay system capable of playing back long sessions on machines around the office.
That eventually produced a replay that triggered the crash every five to seven minutes on average. GGG packaged the replay into a file that could be run on demand and shipped Nvidia the specific rig it ran on — "PC, monitor, hell, we even put the mouse and keyboard in there," Rogers said.
Nvidia came back weeks later with the answer: increasing the shader heap size removed the crashes entirely. The release notes for Game Ready Driver 610.88 list the change as fixing intermittent long pauses that could occur after extended gameplay sessions in DX12 mode.
With the fault closed, Rogers said the studio's engine programmers can return to ordinary performance work. Path of Exile 2 is due to reach 1.0 later this year.
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