BUG Frequent 20-30 Game Freeze + map reset (multiple players affected).

I've been running 581.42 for the past 3 weeks now with no problems. No crashes, no grinding gears, no instance loss, no minimap loss, nothing. Prior to that I ran into this issue quite repeatedly, especially on Act 3 and 4 of the campaign. After 0.3.1 it all went away, I still bounced around drivers 576.88, 581.29 before getting to this one, and all issues went away after the game patch. I still believe it makes sense to go post at the nvidia forum for the drivers so they can try and work out why this only happens with the PoE game engine, as I've not seen this issue with any other game.

Also, I've seen in the forum that AMD GPU's are also affected by the same problem, so that shows only how much more prevalent Nvidia GPU's are, that AMD users are not as widely reparented in the forum population

7 times today doing maps. 13G ram usage and freezes.. why am I even surprised from this trash.

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FeralPig#6720 schrieb:

Hi GGG! Thanks for all the hard work you put into the game. Just wanted to let you know that quite a few of us are experiencing the same bug and it is affecting gameplay quite a bit. We'd really appreciate if you could take a look and push a fix soon.

After POE 2 0.3.0 was released, constantly I experience the following:

- game pauses suddenly and it stalls about 20-30 second.
- after a while, the loading gears / fiery sparks appear in the background.
- loading sparks gone and it goes back to last recorded moment it stalls.
- your explored map status resets.

My specs:

OS Microsoft Windows 11 Home
CPU AMD Ryzen 9 7940HX with Radeon Graphics
RAM 32.0 GB
Storage 1 GB SSD
Graphics card NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU

I enjoy the game a lot and I would love to blast it but in this current state I am unable to, even if I wanted to :/

Thanks for keeping the community updated.

Same issue. Here's my specs:

OS Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
CPU Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-14900K, 3200 Mhz, 24 core, 32 logic procs
RAM 32.0 GB
Storage 1 GB SSD
Graphics card NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Super - drivers 581.15 (when installed) to 581.57 (now)
ScreenResolution 2560 x 1440 x 180 hertz
Average connection speed - Download 800Mb - Upload 750Mb
Game Server MILAN - FRANKFURT - average ping 45 - 50 ms.

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I'd like to point the fact that this issue escalates while in multiplayer (no pause unless the others press pause too) and in most of the cases it equals death.

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The same issue occurr on another computer with lower specs ( RTX 3060, i5).

More details just in case which may be not pertinent:
-I've installed nvidia Studio Drivers some time ago and removed them in favor of actual Game Ready Drivers.
-I've tried to wipe the game out - refresh the drivers - reinstall the game. No success.
-I've already increased the shader pool cache in the Nvidia Control Panel to 100GB but didn't changed anything.
-I have Node.js installed in my computer
-Created a port triggering for POE2 but aswell not effective.

We shouldn't have to do all this :(

+1

Even if I pause the game, it SAYS it's paused but I continue to take damage and I'm already mad we lose 10% xp in maps we didn't even earn that much on - but I'm sure not going to continue to play if I can lose 10% xp because your game keeps crashing.

i had an AI chat:

What’s happening (in plain terms):

During boss fights / hideout banking, the GPU driver briefly crashes or resets.

Windows treats this as a TDR event (Timeout Detection & Recovery) → it’s as if the GPU was unplugged for a split second.

The game doesn’t actually crash anymore because GGG added a safety net:

They spin up a new instance

Copy the game state over

Pause the game → cogwheels

Resume once the driver recovers

So yeah — GGG can’t fix the root cause, they just made it so:

You don’t get booted

You don’t lose progression

That’s why throwing €4500 at the problem didn’t change anything 😛
Your new setup (9800X3D + DDR5 + Gen5 NVMe + 5070 Ti) absolutely rules out CPU, RAM, storage, or raw GPU performance as the cause.

Why it’s almost certainly NVIDIA drivers

Happens across multiple GPU generations

Happens on high-end systems

Only certain driver branches are affected

Rolling back to ~560.xx reportedly eliminates it

That’s textbook driver regression behavior.

Practical things you can do right now

If you want stability over new features:

Roll back to NVIDIA 560.xx

Use DDU (safe mode)

Clean install

Disable GeForce Experience overlay

In NVIDIA Control Panel:

Power management: Prefer maximum performance

Low Latency Mode: Off

G-Sync: temporarily disable (for testing)

Windows:

Disable Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS)

Make sure no GPU monitoring tools are polling aggressively

Optional (advanced):

Increase TDR delay in registry
(doesn’t fix the bug, but reduces how often Windows panics)

The frustrating truth

You’re right:

Not your fault

Not your hardware

Mostly not GGG’s fault either

100% a driver stability issue

Until NVIDIA fixes it properly, older drivers = smoother gameplay, even on bleeding-edge rigs.

yup sign me up

prevalent in 0.2
gone in 0.3
back again in 0.4

This is happening for me aswel, initally it wasnt very often but now its happening almost every second map