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Path of Exile 2 finally has a fix for two of its longest-lasting, and most frustrating, technical problems
Grinding Gear Games says the latest Path of Exile 2 patch, combined with Nvidia’s 680.88 Game Ready driver, substantially improves two persistent technical issues: ‘device removed’ crashes and lengthy shader compilation. The changes matter because both faults had disrupted play for months, particularly for some players in demanding end-game content.
The device-removed issue could cause freezes, black screens and degraded performance when the graphics driver crashed; developer Jonathan Rogers said it took about 18 months to demonstrate its frequency to Nvidia. Separately, an Nvidia-related shader-cache problem could lead to visual glitches and long loading times, so Grinding Gear Games reduced shader file sizes to slow cache exhaustion, although it cannot fully resolve the driver issue itself.
In short
- Nvidia driver 680.88 and a game patch target two major PoE2 faults.
- Device-removed crashes particularly affected end-game players.
- Smaller shaders should reduce cache-related loading and visual problems.
Explained simply
Path of Exile 2 is a free-to-play online action role-playing game developed by Grinding Gear Games. For several months, the game has been plagued by two serious technical issues that caused crashes and performance problems.
The first problem, called "device removed," would crash the graphics driver during gameplay, causing freezes, black screens, and degraded performance. The second involved shader compilation—the process of preparing graphics rendering instructions—which ran inefficiently and led to long loading times and visual glitches.
These persistent problems affected many players, particularly those tackling demanding end-game content. Resolving them required coordination between Grinding Gear Games and graphics hardware manufacturer Nvidia, as the issues spanned both game code and driver software.