They had to go that far to convince Jensen Huang’s company that the problem was actually with their hardware.

During the most recent Path of Exile 2 league, we almost quit the game. Every 20 minutes or so, the entire game would freeze. We’d wait 30 seconds for everything to start working again, praying that we wouldn’t lose our character the moment we regained control. Since the game’s early access release, players have experienced periodic freezes and crashes. The only solution was changing a setting that significantly degraded the graphics quality until Grinding Gear Games (GGG), the developer, figured out a fix.

As it turns out, the freezes were just the beginning of the debugging saga that the developers have been dealing with for the past year and a half. This week marked the end of the battle against Path of Exile 2’s persistent GPU shader crashes, thanks to GGG’s tremendous effort diagnosing the issue. Although the developers identified the exact Nvidia driver code causing the problem, the game’s director, Jonathan Rogers, explained in a recently released video that Nvidia won’t fix anything unless players provide the steps needed to reproduce the bug.

GGG initially had someone play the game for several hours in the hope that it would eventually crash. However, since there were no concrete clues as to what might be causing the problem, this approach relied entirely on chance. After failing to find a solution, GGG decided to create a system that would prevent the game from crashing, at least. The game froze because the GPU crashed and, without shutting down, reloaded the textures, shaders, and the entire engine. According to Rogers, the workaround was sufficient, but they were determined to find the cause of the problem. GGG built several features into the engine to track useful data, as well as a special replay system capable of playing back long gameplay sessions—lasting hours—on office PCs.

They packaged this replay into a runnable file, then sent the PC on which it ran to Nvidia. It took a while, but Nvidia finally responded and said they would look into the matter. A few weeks later, they received a fix: increasing the size of the shader heap would eliminate the crashes completely. Earlier this week, Nvidia released the Game Ready Driver 610.88 with the following note: “Path of Exile 2: Fixed the occasional long pauses that could occur after extended gameplay sessions in DX12 mode.”

“Unfortunately, those steps can’t just be ‘grind to the top-tier juiced maps.’ Even though this is ultimately a bug in the Nvidia driver that affected a huge number of high-level players, quite frankly, they just didn’t seem to believe that it was as common as we said it was. At that point, you’re just taking shots in the dark. So, we went down an incredibly deep rabbit hole trying to reproduce it. Eventually, with replays and an incredible amount of work from our engine team, we managed to reproduce it fairly consistently. We got a replay that would reproduce the bug every five to seven minutes on average. We even included the mouse and keyboard for Nvidia, PC, and monitor. The saga is over, and now our engine programmers can focus on optimizing more normal performance problems,” said Rogers, popping open a bottle of champagne in celebration.

It took almost two years to resolve this issue. We hope no further bugs will crop up so everyone can enjoy a seamless experience when the game reaches version 1.0 later this year.

Source: PCGamer