PC Freezing During Loading Screens in Path of Exile 2

Hi GGG,

I've been experiencing a frustrating issue where my entire PC freezes during loading screens in Path of Exile 2. This happens intermittently, regardless of the location I'm loading into.

Here's a breakdown of the problem:

When entering a loading screen, my PC occasionally freezes completely.
The screen locks up entirely, but I still hear some game sounds in the background.
No input works (mouse, keyboard, etc.), and the only solution is to power off the PC manually and restart it.
I tried switching to Vulkan as suggested in some forums, but this did not resolve the issue.
The problem persists randomly; sometimes the game works fine, but more often than not, it freezes during loading.

I'd greatly appreciate any advice or solutions to this issue. Is there a specific setting or troubleshooting step I should try to resolve this?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Best regards,
Arani

I'd like to add some more weight to this issue, I also experience it and it is very frustrating. I have the same issue in PoE 1, which makes me think it's an interaction between the game engine and my hardware/firmware.

However updating/clean installing drivers does not resolve the issue (RTX 2080 on latest 566.36 drivers.) I have an Intel i7 9700KF. Switching DX/Vulkan does not fix the issue.

Thank you!

I was also having this issue. I'm now unable to log into my character at all. When trying to log in, it goes to a loading screen and crashes.

Someone in another thread mentioned adding --noasync --softwareaudio --nopreload --gc 2 to launch options in poe2-properties menu in steam.

A good back up is to go to task manager(ctrl-alt-delete) click poe2 and go to details, then set affinity. Turn off the first 2 cpus(or 1 if you see less then 12). Doing this will let you just cancel the process if it crashes, no more full PC lock.