Sudden freeze, gears appear, seconds later the game resumes - Is there a new fix for this?

nVidia users hate this bug. On a live stream, Jonathan confirmed what was happening. The game was crashing in an nVidia video driver and they could not track it down or fix it. They came up with a hell of a hack. When the crash occurred, they would save state before the crash, pause the game, rebuild the state, and then resume the game. He confirmed it was a "hack" but they were unable to fix the crash and they put this in as a work around until a fix could be found.

When the crash occurs, the user sees the game suddenly freeze up, after a few seconds the screen goes black and you see the grinding gears on the screen and can hear that the game is still progressing in the background,. Eventually the video state is restored and you're back in the game.

Jonathan couldn't remember which driver was the last one that worked but the community was able to establish that if you rolled back your drivers to 566.36, which was the last driver that worked, the crash would no longer happen and you could play without ever having the freeze/restore state hack occur. This worked wonderfully all throughout 0.2 and you could happily ignore all the other so-called "Fixes", like turning off Reflex, lowering your cores, etc., they all missed the mark, according to Jonathan, with Mark sitting right next to him confirming it.

But when I came back to PoE2 recently for 0.3, I was prompted to update my video drivers or else not be able to use the latest patch. So now the freeze/restore state hack has returned, suggesting that they STILL have not been able to fix the bug.

Anyone have any updates on this?

Switching from DX12 to Vulkan fixed it for me

Delete the Dx12 forder where game downloaded and run game again let it download the new files. I only get 1 freeze issue in my hideout.. (made 10 or more maps after this with out any issue)

Yeah this issue is absurd at this point. I don't know a single person playing not experiencing it, and its borderline unplayable at this point. It causes you to die constantly as a result also.

Given how large of a portion of the playerbase is dealing with this, this issue should be priority #1 to the point every single dev on the team should be looking at how to fix it.

"

Rikku#7536 wrote:

Switching from DX12 to Vulkan fixed it for me

Same.

Given what Jonathan and Mark have said about the cause of the bug, and their hack to fix it, it's hard to see how switching to Vulkan can fix this. When Steam uses Vulkan it is still using nVidia drivers.

Also, you would think that if the fix was that easy, Jonathan or Mark would have suggested "switch to Vulkan until we fix it". Vulkan wasn't even mentioned, even though Jonathan went through the entire laborious discussion about how the bug crashes in nVidia, and the hack they pulled off to keep the gaming running after the crash.

I've talked to a number of players who've suggested the same "fix", only to see them come back online and report that the bug was still occurring. Given how hard it's been for GGG to reproduce this bug, it's probably extremely difficult to distinguish the anecdotal and potentially coincidental accounts of people for whom this is alleged to work, from a verifiable solution.

But in the spirit of trying ANYTHING that could help, I'll try using Vulkan again and report back what I've found. Meanhwile, I hope the devs do see this thread and step up their efforts. This is SUPER annoying.

"

Winterfury#4666 wrote:

Given what Jonathan and Mark have said about the cause of the bug, and their hack to fix it, it's hard to see how switching to Vulkan can fix this. When Steam uses Vulkan it is still using nVidia drivers.

Also, you would think that if the fix was that easy, Jonathan or Mark would have suggested "switch to Vulkan until we fix it". Vulkan wasn't even mentioned, even though Jonathan went through the entire laborious discussion about how the bug crashes in nVidia, and the hack they pulled off to keep the gaming running after the crash.

I've talked to a number of players who've suggested the same "fix", only to see them come back online and report that the bug was still occurring. Given how hard it's been for GGG to reproduce this bug, it's probably extremely difficult to distinguish the anecdotal and potentially coincidental accounts of people for whom this is alleged to work, from a verifiable solution.

But in the spirit of trying ANYTHING that could help, I'll try using Vulkan again and report back what I've found. Meanhwile, I hope the devs do see this thread and step up their efforts. This is SUPER annoying.

No idea if we're experiencing exactly the same bug, but what I said earlier is true: I had the stutter to black screen/gears then everything recovers and my map becomes reset. This happened over and over the first day or two of the league for me, and once I changed to Vulkan from DX12 in the game options it never happened again. A week+ of no issues now and it's the only change I made. Windows 11, 576.02 drivers. I get the PoE2 warning popup about old drivers, but I don't care because it works flawlessly now.

"

Winterfury#4666 wrote:

Given what Jonathan and Mark have said about the cause of the bug, and their hack to fix it, it's hard to see how switching to Vulkan can fix this. When Steam uses Vulkan it is still using nVidia drivers.

Do you have a link to what they've said about it?

Speaking from personal experience, switching to Vulkan just changes what the issue is. I'm returning to using DX12 renderer when I play, just keeping an eye on the space the game is using--since I'm low on drive space and haven't gone through the effort to pick up another HDD, so I can't just set the shader cache size to "unlimited".



The issue seems to occur for me when the total shader cache size at AppData\Local\NVIDIA\DXCache is right around 10GB. I wasn't paying attention to this directory the last time I had the issue, so I don't know how much space is freed up. I'm back up to 3GB now, after doing half of Act 2.

I tried Vulkan for a while again, and from what I can tell...it doesn't seem to be using the shader cache at all, so shaders are constantly being compiled and giving me worse performance.

I've been wondering what the hell was going on, I knew it wasn't lag and it almost seems like it was but the big difference with this issue and lag is when you lag your dead once your internet catches back up with this its a freeze its like the entire game state freezes and i can't speak for everyone else but the "hack" happens for me every 90 seconds to 2 minutes at tops. Do they not realize how many people use Nvidia its like 85% of all pc gamers, How do they sleep at night know they released this garbage the game is barely playable you think they would just roll back to .2 and fix there crap this is a beta who cares about the league fix the damn game.

Ok, I spent a long time searching back through dev streams with Jonathan and I could not find the exact quote. However, in a January 2025 in a Tavern Talk on Ghazzy TV on YouTube, Jonathan mentions the crash. Here's a link to the video:

https://youtu.be/WjxzTAcJqAM?si=VutsPSxgTOejW3ss&t=6488

He makes a very vague reference to the crash at 1:48:08. The video I saw must have come after this because in the video I saw he specifically discusses what they had to do to create a "fix" to this nVidia driver crash, in which he describes how when the crash occurs, they pause the game, save the state, fix the crash, restore the state, and then resume the game. This is why you suddenly freeze, then see grinding gears, then the game resumes in a few seconds.

If anyone feels ambitious, they can continue the search, but I recall the conversation vividly, I just don't remember which video it was in.

By the way, I switched to Vulkan and played for a couple of hours tonight and the whole hack routine happened again, so I can confirm that on my machine, at least, switching to Vulkan is NOT a fix.

Reminder, the last nVidia driver that worked was 566.36, so if you can revert to that driver, you can avoid the problem. I'm not sure that's possible now however since as soon as 0.3 dropped, I was prompted to update my drivers! Oh well.