Path of Exile 2 Dev Mailed Nvidia a Whole PC to Squash a Year-Old Crash Bug
Grinding Gear Games spent roughly 18 months chasing a graphics driver crash that hit high-level PoE2 players, and ultimately had to ship an entire computer setup to Nvidia to get it fixed.
A Bug So Stubborn It Required Postage
Most studios handle a persistent crash by filing a detailed bug report and crossing their fingers. Grinding Gear Games, the developer behind Path of Exile 2, went considerably further. As reported by Dexerto, the studio literally boxed up a PC, a monitor, a mouse, and a keyboard and mailed the whole thing to Nvidia headquarters.
The crash in question had been plaguing players for roughly a year and a half. It targeted Nvidia graphics cards running driver version 566.36 and newer, and it hit hard, specifically affecting a large number of high-level players who spend serious time in the endgame. In a new developer video, PoE2 director Jonathan Rogers laid out just how maddening the investigation had been.
“We found out that it only affected Nvidia graphics cards,” Rogers explained. “Ultimately this is a bug in the Nvidia driver, and it affected a huge number of high-level players. Quite frankly, they just didn’t really seem to believe that it was as common as we said it was.”
That skepticism from Nvidia made an already difficult situation worse. The crash was hard to reproduce reliably, which is often the thing that makes a bug feel almost impossible to fix. You cannot hand off a problem you cannot demonstrate.
Building the Proof
Grinding Gear Games eventually engineered their way around that wall. The team built a replay system capable of triggering the crash on demand, producing a reliable failure every five to seven minutes on one specific machine. That consistency was the key that unlocked everything that followed.
Once they had the replay packaged into a single folder, the team decided not to leave anything to chance. Rogers described the decision plainly: “We decided to take one of our computers that reproduced the problem and ship it to Nvidia. PC, monitor, hell, we even put the mouse and keyboard in there. We didn’t want to leave a single variable to chance.”
That level of thoroughness is worth pausing on. Shipping peripherals alongside a tower is not standard QA protocol. It speaks to how many times this team had probably watched a bug vanish the moment conditions changed even slightly, and how determined they were not to let that happen again.
The Fix, Finally
According to Rogers, Nvidia was able to reproduce the problem about a month after receiving the machine, at which point an engineer was assigned to investigate. Two weeks after that, Nvidia identified an internal shader heap size setting that was causing the crashes. The fix shipped as Nvidia driver version 610.88.
Grinding Gear Games is recommending players install that new driver alongside the latest Path of Exile 2 update to fully clear the issue.
The whole saga is a reminder of how layered PC gaming debugging actually is. A crash inside a game is not always a bug inside the game. Sometimes it lives in a driver, sometimes it requires months of reverse engineering a replay system just to demonstrate the problem exists, and sometimes the only viable path forward is printing a shipping label and sending your office hardware across the country. Eighteen months is a long time to chase something. At least the players at the end of the wait finally have a driver version to point to.
What was the Path of Exile 2 bug that required shipping a PC to Nvidia?
It was a graphics driver crash affecting players using Nvidia cards with driver version 566.36 and newer. According to Grinding Gear Games director Jonathan Rogers, it hit a large number of high-level players and took roughly a year and a half to resolve.
How did Grinding Gear Games get Nvidia to fix the crash?
The studio built a replay system that could reproduce the crash every five to seven minutes on one specific machine, then packaged that replay and shipped the entire PC, monitor, mouse, and keyboard to Nvidia so engineers could reproduce the issue themselves.
What Nvidia driver version fixes the Path of Exile 2 crash?
Nvidia driver version 610.88, which includes an internal shader heap size setting change that eliminates the crashes, according to Grinding Gear Games.