Game/PC freeze on loading screen

Game and PC completely freezes on loading screen cpu load raises to 100%, mostly on first loading after login. Sometimes i still can slowly move mouse but nothing else but hard reboot.
Image below shows the afterburner info in the freeze moment (don't mind last 2 cores' load, pretend they are 100% too, described below)


My tech specs:
Ryzen 7800x3d
RTX 4090
Windows 11 24H2
Steam

Same problems described here:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3543686/page/2#p25404054 @Ramymn
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3585333/page/1#p25477683 @Happytime44
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3585333/page/3#p25479056 @Anathema123

What doesn't help:
Rolling back nvidia driver
Reinstalling the game (including settings)

What helps:
Turning in-game multithreading off ("dont-play" solution)
Switching to DX11/Vulkan (unstable solution)

Temporal workaround to people, whose pc freezes completely:
Turning off some cores will help to make pc not to freeze completely so you can close POE, not hard reset your PC. To make so (automatically):
1. Put affinity.bat in game folder, with the following content (you can replace 0FFF mask with mask corresponding to your cpu):

"

%comspec% /C start /normal /affinity 0FFF PathOfExile_x64Steam.exe

2. Set the launch option in steam (replace path to bat file with your path, do not delete quotes):

"

"B:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Path of Exile\affinity.bat" %command%

Because now I can reproduce the freeze easily I used Sysinternals' process monitor to look at the game activity. Seems like in the moment the game freezes it stops all activity but receiving tcp-packages. Hope this helps if any of the developers happen to see it. I can also share complete procmon log files.

FYI, This is not an issue which is limited to PoE only.

I have the exact same behaviour in Forza Motorsport, identical complete system freeze to what occurs during zone transitions / loading screens in PoE.

System remains online, but all CPU threads get locked. Also fixed there by removing core affinity for the process for 1 CPU core, so the OS is still able to recover by killing the offending process.

I'm sure other games will exhibit the same behaviour, but these are the only two I've played since building my new machine and installing W11 24H2.

One thing in common for everyone having these issues: W11 24H2.

"

Anathema123 wrote:

I have the exact same behaviour in Forza Motorsport, identical complete system freeze to what occurs during zone transitions / loading screens in PoE.

I couldn't find any game with such issue. "Heavy" games like Horizon, RDR2, SW:Jedi, synthetic benchmarks and even stress-tests – everything works fine, but POE.
In POE I can easily reproduce the freeze by trying the first load after login. If I survived first loading screen, I will not get freeze any time soon.
I tried Forza (2023) and couldn't achieve even close to 100% CPU usage, nor an any freeze

I came to the same conclusion that 24H2 may be clue to the problem root

I can ditto that Im experience the same thing, only POE that happens for me, exactly same experience that it usually freeze entire pc at initial loading screen, have an older system i5 with a 1650s

My PC is also completely freezing on loading screens in POE

My system
Windows 11 24H2 (No updates available)
Ryzen 5800X3D
Nvidia 3080 (Driver 566.14)
Steam Client

Go back to windows 10, you guys all went to Alpha release of windows and are dealing with the consequences of a buggy platform.