Path of Exile 2 has been struggling with annoying crashes since its release. Now developer Grinding Gear Games has explained how absurd the path to a solution really was.
What was the bug? For almost a year and a half, practically since the very first release, Path of Exile 2 has been plagued by a so-called “Device Removed” error. The game freezes briefly, reloads, and then runs a bit choppy for a while, especially during mapping in the endgame.
Only Nvidia graphics cards with a specific driver version are affected. The nasty part: The crash happens completely within the graphics driver, without any error message. The developers couldn’t just look in the code to see what was going wrong, they had to guess.
You can see the trailer for the new Wraith here:
A Case for Nvidia
Why didn’t Nvidia simply fix the bug themselves? As the head of Path of Exile 2 explains in the video on YouTube, Nvidia wanted to help, but only with clear steps to trigger the error at the push of a button. The problem: That’s not how the bug works. “Just play high-level maps for hours and wait for it to crash” is not a guide that Nvidia’s team could work with.
Although it was a genuine error in their own driver that affected a large number of players according to GGG, Nvidia initially seemed unconvinced that the problem was really that big.
You can see the video of the action here:
How did the developers manage to convince Nvidia? Grinding Gear Games built a replay system that could reliably trigger the crash every 5 to 7 minutes. But since the error did not occur on every PC, things got really curious:
The developers packed one of their PCs, where the bug was guaranteed to be reproducible, completely with mouse and keyboard, into a box, and sent the whole setup directly to Nvidia. No room for excuses left.
A month later, an Nvidia engineer finally saw the error with his own eyes. Two weeks later, the solution was found, and a week after that, there was a new driver that actually fixed the problem.
Did you think it was so difficult to get certain bugs fixed in games? Feel free to let us know in the comments! You can learn more about Path of Exile 2 and its secrets here: According to the head of Path of Exile 2, there are 2 secrets in the game that you haven’t found yet
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