Path of Exile 2 finally has a fix for two of its longest-lasting and most frustrating technical problems, with director Jonathan Rogers celebrating the occasion by popping open a bottle of champagne.
In a new video released by PoE2 developer Grinding Gear Games, Rogers explained that the new Nvidia Game Ready driver (version 680.88) alongside the latest Path of Exile 2 patch will significantly improve problems with both shaders and device removed issues, which have proven painful thorns in the side of players for months.
The device removed problems stemming from a crash with the player’s graphics driver which resulted in a temporary game freeze, a black screen, and poor performance for some players. This issue was frequent for some players in the end game, and especially in later patches. After a year-and-a-half of work, it turned out this was impacted by those using Nvidia drivers.
According to Rogers, Nvidia didn’t “believe it was as common as we said it was” despite it being a bug with Nvidia drivers affecting end-game players, forcing Grinding Gear Games to hunker down and prove the bug validity. Rogers goes on to explain that, after some tinkering, the company sent a whole PC setup with a version of the game where the bug would happen every few minutes to Nvidia.
As for the shaders issue, it used to take a long time for Path of Exile 2 to compile shaders. Rogers describes it as “complex”, and in super basic layperson’s terms, visual effects for assets in Path of Exile 2 weren’t being cached properly thanks to another Nvidia driver problem leading the shader cache folders being full, resulting in visual bugs and longer load screens.
Grinding Gear Games can’t fix this problem outright, but it has made its shaders a smaller file size, meaning the shader cache folder shouldn’t fill up as fast.
With this, the engine optimisation team are back to doing their regular day-to-day work, and Rogers ends the video popping open a bottle of champagne. Specifically it looks to be a bottle of Veuve Clicquot Vintage Champagne. According to Fortnum & Mason this champagne is “nutty and beautifully balanced”, which is about as apt a descriptor of Path of Exile 2 as I can think of.
