Path of Exile 2 (POE 2) has finally addressed the shader loading delays and device removal errors that have plagued players since its December 2024 launch, and the team has posted a celebratory video to mark the occasion.

Grinding Gear Games Game Director Jonathan Rogers shared the news via a YouTube video on the 30th. To fully resolve these issues, players need to update their Nvidia graphics driver to version 610.88 and download the POE 2 0.5.4e patch. Those already using version 610.47 will find the fixes are already applied.

Jonathan Rogers explained the errors in detail. The 'device removal' error is a phenomenon where the graphics driver freezes, causing the game to hang. Even if the game returned after a loading screen, the process of reloading shaders in the background caused excessive CPU usage, leading to performance degradation. To mitigate this, the developers had been using a temporary 'forced restart' system that cleared all textures and shaders from memory before reloading resources.

Investigation revealed that the issue occurred on Nvidia graphics cards using drivers version 566.36 or higher. The team even reproduced the error on a PC that crashed every 5 to 7 minutes and shipped it to Nvidia headquarters. Nvidia identified that increasing an internal metric called 'shader heap size' would resolve the error, leading to the release of the 610.88 driver.

The cause and solution for shader compilation delays were also revealed. POE 2 uses a method of loading visible graphics first and pre-loading the rest in the background. Completed graphical data is stored in a 'cache,' a temporary storage space within the driver that controls the graphics card.

The problematic Nvidia drivers lacked a feature to automatically clear old information. As a result, when the cache became full, it could not store new data, causing monsters or objects to appear transparent or leading to abnormally long loading times. To address this, the developers compressed the physical size of the graphical data to alleviate the overflow of the temporary storage space.

Jonathan Rogers concluded the video by saying, "I want to thank everyone for their patience while we sorted this out, and I look forward to seeing you in Wraeclast. It’s time to pop the champagne!" and finished the video by uncorking a bottle of champagne.