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Grinding Gear Games has revealed it had to ship an entire PC setup to Nvidia to get a game-breaking Path of Exile 2 bug fixed after the crash proved too difficult to reproduce reliably.
In a new developer video, PoE2 director Jonathan Rogers explained the studio had spent around a year and a half investigating the crash, a graphics driver issue that affected players using Nvidia graphics cards with driver version 566.36 and newer.
Grinding Gear Games sent Nvidia a complete PC setup
According to Rogers, the issue was both widespread and extremely difficult to reproduce.
“We found out that it only affected Nvidia graphics cards,” he explained. “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.”
Grinding Gear Games eventually built a replay system capable of reproducing the crash every five to seven minutes on one specific machine. After packaging the replay into a single folder, the studio also shipped the entire PC that consistently reproduced the issue.
“We decided to take one of our computers that reproduced the problem and ship it to Nvidia,” Rogers said. “PC, monitor, hell, we even put the mouse and keyboard in there. We didn’t want to leave a single variable to chance.”
According to Rogers, Nvidia was able to reproduce the problem around a month after receiving the machine before assigning a driver engineer to investigate it. Two weeks later, the company identified an internal shader heap size setting that eliminated the crashes, leading to the release of Nvidia driver version 610.88.
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Grinding Gear Games said players should install the new Nvidia driver alongside the latest Path of Exile 2 update, with Rogers saying both the crashing issue and shader loading problems have now been “significantly improved.”
Path of Exile 2 is currently in early access, and received massive attention in 2025, after Elon Musk admitted to account boosting in the action-RPG.
