The two technical problems that haunted Path of Exile 2 players for the longest time — shader compilation slowdowns and "device removed" crashes — have been fixed. Jonathan Rogers, the game's director, announced the fixes in a video released by Grinding Gear Games on 30 July 2026, and celebrated by opening a bottle of Veuve Clicquot Vintage Champagne on camera. (Eurogamer)

The "device removed" crash was the nastier of the two. A bug specific to Nvidia graphics drivers, it caused the player's graphics driver to fail mid-session — freezing the game temporarily, throwing up black screens, and wrecking performance, particularly during the end-game content that players sink dozens of hours into reaching. Fixing it took roughly a year and a half of work. (Eurogamer)

The shader issue was less catastrophic but equally persistent. Shaders are small programs that tell a graphics card how to render a scene, and Path of Exile 2 was taking far too long to compile them. The root cause was an Nvidia driver problem that caused the game's shader cache folders — where compiled shaders are stored for reuse — to fill up, leading to visual glitches and longer loading screens. Grinding Gear Games mitigated the issue by reducing shader file sizes so the cache fills up less quickly. (Eurogamer)

The solution for players is straightforward: Nvidia's Game Ready driver version 680.88 combined with the latest Path of Exile 2 patch. The fix had already been rolled out automatically roughly one week before the public announcement, according to the official news post titled "Path of Exile 2: Shader and Device Removed Fixed." (Path of Exile forum)

Getting there was not a smooth process. Nvidia initially did not believe the "device removed" bug was as widespread as Grinding Gear Games claimed. To prove the problem was real, the studio shipped a complete PC — tower, monitor, the works — running a version of the game where the crash triggered every few minutes, straight to Nvidia's doorstep. That demonstration settled the argument. (Eurogamer)

With both fixes live, the studio's engine optimisation team has returned to their regular day-to-day work. Rogers, who co-founded Grinding Gear Games in New Zealand in 2006, marked the moment with the champagne — a coda to one of the more stubborn engineering problems the action role-playing game has faced since its early access launch. (Eurogamer)

For players who put the game down because of crashes or interminable loading screens, the patch notes are an invitation to come back. For everyone else, it is a reminder that some of the hardest bugs to squash live not in the game code itself, but in the layers between a game and the hardware it runs on.