Random game freeze followed by black screen and loading gears.

I am not sure what is causing this. It happens in combat and I am pretty sure it also randomly happens in town when I'm just doing inventory management.

The game will freeze. I will get a windows loading wheel like the game is about to crash, but I'll do nothing. Sometimes if I click I get the windows option to crash the application or wait for it to respond. I click to wait to respond.

Then after a few seconds, the playable portion of the game screen will go to black. By that I mean that I'm pretty sure the mana/health/skill bars are still visible.

Then the GGG gears will show up like it's loading and then the game comes back, but the entire minimal will be reset and undiscovered.

I think gameplay pauses for at least a few seconds because it happens in combat sometimes and I don't die but sometimes I can see my health going down while the rest of the screen is still black. I played in the first league and didn't have this problem. It's only recently that I came back for Dawn of the Hunt.

I have the exact same thing (steam client), tried verifying the game files but no succes.

It happens very randomly, even in hideout without much action.

Got a similar thing, two times the game has "locked up", where the mouse etc still works fine in game, but nothing happens when I click anything, and all enemies and NPCS are locked in place.

First time it happened vs the The Devourer in Mud Barrow, mid-fight everything just stopped moving. Could move mouse cursor but no inputs affected anything.
Alt+F4ed, reconnected, and the fight continued like nothing had happened.

Just happened again in Clearfell Encampment, was doing some inventory management and suddenly the game just stopped responding to inputs, but sounds and animations were still "active" in the game.
After about 10 seconds or so the game just closed down do desktop.

No error messages in game or windows event log.

This happens to me both in PoE1 and 2. I just upgraded my mobo/cpu/ram a few days ago (it was happening prior to the upgrade), and it STILL happens now. I assume its related to my graphics card, 4080 super, but i have zero issues in other games. Did a fresh install of windows after I upgraded my mobo/cpu so I doubt it is OS related.

Anyone found a fix for this? It happens on both my computer and my friends computer like ALL the time.. no idea how many bossfights we've lost due to this happening all the time

I have the same issue, installed the PoE 2 update today(Steam) along with updating Win11 and Nvidia to the latest version and have had this issue happening like 6-7 times now through Act1.
Sometimes the client locks up/freezes for like 4-5 seconds but I can move the mouse and if I click it gives me that cursor goes into that spinning "Windows waiting for the app" to respond but it does eventually start responding again and I can continue.
Similarly I also sometimes get lock-up where the game freezes and after a couple of seconds some part of the screen goes black with the the grinding gear..
It has not crashed to desktop for me at least, it has always managed to recover but it is annoying..

Following because I still have this issue, have cleared shaders, switching between Vulkan and DX12 doesn't stop it.