For over 10 years, Path of Exile has been a beloved action RPG, offering deep mechanics and intense challenges. However, players have been dealing with an ongoing issue: crashes to desktop. Whether you’re launching the game using DirectX or Vulkan, crashes seem inevitable — with DirectX resulting in a crash without an error message, and Vulkan crashing with an error. These issues typically occur after 10 to 20 minutes of gameplay, leaving players frustrated and searching for solutions.
The Crashing Issue: A Long-Standing Problem
What’s strange about these persistent crashes is that they aren’t considered bugs, according to the game developers. If they were, the two-and-a-half coders responsible for the game’s ongoing development would have likely fixed the issue by now. Instead, these crashes have been a part of the Path of Exile experience since launch. Some leagues may be slightly more stable than others, but the crashes always return, meaning this issue is simply a part of the game.
Possible Solutions: What Players Have Tried
Over the years, many players have turned to various fixes they’ve found online to reduce crashes. Suggestions range from increasing virtual memory to underclocking CPUs, with varying degrees of success. However, none of these fixes have truly eradicated the issue. It’s clear that something more fundamental is at play.
The One Fix That Actually Works: Disabling Multi-Threading
The most effective solution so far, although not ideal, is disabling multi-threading in the game’s settings. Doing so limits the game to using only one core of your multi-core processor. While this significantly impacts performance, it doesn’t cripple the game entirely. In fact, disabling multi-threading can still give you a stable 40-50 FPS, which is sufficient for an enjoyable Path of Exile experience, particularly if you’re not aiming for the highest graphical performance.
In fact, after disabling multi-threading, one player reported several hours of uninterrupted gameplay without a single crash — a rare victory in the fight against these persistent desktop crashes.
Final Thoughts
It’s frustrating to know that such a fundamental issue has persisted in Path of Exile for so long, but the workaround of disabling multi-threading at least provides some stability. While performance will suffer, it’s a small price to pay for a more stable game experience. Hopefully, with continued updates, the developers will eventually find a more permanent solution to this long-standing issue, but until then, this is one way to enjoy the game without frequent crashes.