Path of Exile 2 finally buries its shader bug and the 'device removed' error

If you walked away from Path of Exile 2 fed up with shader stutters and desktop crashes carrying the 'device removed' error, it might be time to reinstall. Grinding Gear Games has announced that two of the ARPG's oldest and most frustrating technical problems —present since the early access launch— are finally solved.

The root of the problem wasn't entirely in the game. An Nvidia driver (566.36, released just before the December 2024 launch) stopped automatically clearing the shader cache. Over long sessions that data piled up and eventually triggered both the stutters and the 'device removed' crashes, hitting endgame maps especially hard. The result: a bug that was extremely common yet fiendishly hard to reproduce under controlled conditions.

After months of being unable to reproduce it reliably, the studio went the hard route: it shipped a physical machine to Nvidia's engineers so they could see the failure firsthand. With the problem in front of them, they found the key: raising an internal value called the shader heap size made the crash go away. "It was annoying, because the problem was both incredibly common, and yet very hard to reproduce reliably," admitted game director Jonathan Rogers, who celebrated closing the case with a bottle of champagne.

The fix doesn't come from updating the game alone. It needs the combination of Path of Exile 2 on its 9.5.4e patch and Nvidia's new GeForce Game Ready Driver 610.88. With both installed, the studio considers the two issues closed; if you were dragging them along, it's worth confirming your driver is up to date before heading back to Wraeclast.

It's one of those technical wins that don't fill patch notes but change the day-to-day: for many players, the difference between enduring the endgame and quitting it. That the final solution came out of a direct collaboration with the hardware maker says something about the size of the headache it was.