Grinding Gear Games studio shared an unusual story about resolving one of the most serious technical issues in Path of Exile 2. According to development lead Jonathan Rogers, to get NVIDIA to acknowledge a bug in their drivers, the developers had to send the company a fully assembled computer.
Although Path of Exile 2 is currently in early access, many technical issues are promptly fixed with updates. However, two of the most painful shortcomings — crashes with a “device removed” error and severe stuttering during shader compilation — remained unresolved for a long time.
As Rogers explained, investigations showed that the problem exclusively affected NVIDIA graphics cards and manifested on driver versions 566.36 and newer. Coincidentally, this particular driver was released shortly before Path of Exile 2's early access launch.
The developers tried to contact NVIDIA but encountered an unexpected difficulty. According to Rogers, the graphics card manufacturer demanded reproducible steps to confirm the bug and did not consider the problem as widespread as the studio claimed, despite numerous complaints from high-level players.
Ultimately, Grinding Gear Games took an unusual step. The studio took a computer on which the crash was guaranteed to reproduce, packed it along with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and sent the entire kit to NVIDIA's office.
About a month later, NVIDIA engineers were able to see the bug with their own eyes and assigned a specialist to investigate. About two weeks ago, the company discovered that increasing an internal parameter, shader heap size, eliminated the crashes. Since this setting relates to the driver, NVIDIA was able to make the change specifically for Path of Exile 2.
Fixes have already started appearing in a fresh game update and the new NVIDIA driver 610.88, which also aims to eliminate severe freezes during shader loading.