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.