According to a recent interesting anecdote revealed by the Path of Exile 2 development team, Grinding Gear Games, they once encountered a major bug during operations that frequently caused crashes. After the team repeatedly tried to fix the issue but ultimately remained helpless, they decided to ship the entire development computer, along with the keyboard and monitor, directly to Nvidia for assistance.
In a recently released development video, Path of Exile 2’s production director Jonathan Rogers explained that the team spent about a year and a half investigating this crash bug, and ultimately discovered that the culprit was actually Nvidia’s graphics card driver. Specifically, this is an issue that occurs with version 566.36 or later.
In response, Jonathan Rogers said that the problem is not only quite widespread but also very difficult to reproduce, which is why they have never been able to completely eradicate it.
“We found that this only affected Nvidia graphics cards, and eventually we discovered it was a bug in Nvidia’s drivers that was seriously impacting many high-level players. Strange as it may sound, they didn’t seem to believe the issue was as frequent as we claimed,” he said.
In the end, Grinding Gear Games managed to build a replay system on a designated machine that reproduced the crash every five to seven minutes. After packaging the replay files into a folder, the dev team also shipped the entire development PC that kept reproducing the issue.
“We’ve decided to package up one of the computers that can reproduce this issue and ship it directly to Nvidia. The whole system, monitor, and even the keyboard—everything went out together. We don’t want to leave any variable to chance,” he said.
According to Jonathan Rogers, Nvidia officials finally managed to reproduce the issue about a month after receiving the console, then assigned a driver engineer to investigate. After another two weeks, they successfully pinpointed the root cause, and after adjusting an internal Shader Heap size setting, they finally eliminated the crash, subsequently releasing driver version 610.88 for Nvidia graphics cards.
Therefore, Grinding Gear Games strongly recommends that players using Nvidia graphics cards install the latest version of the drivers, as well as updates for Path of Exile 2 itself, and the crash issues that have long troubled both players and the development team appear to have been significantly alleviated.
Path of Exile 2 is currently in early access, with the 1.0 full release expected by the end of 2026.
Source: KOCPC Chinese