Severe loading times, memory-related crashes and stalls with Vulkan on AMD RX 7000 (PoE2 0.4)

Title
Severe loading times, memory-related crashes and stalls with Vulkan on AMD RX 7000 (PoE2 0.4)

Description
Since patch 0.4, Vulkan provides very good in-game performance for me, but causes extremely long loading times, unstable transitions and memory-related errors, making it impractical to use despite high FPS.

System Specs
- OS: Windows 11 Pro
- CPU: Intel i5-12600KF
- GPU: AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT
- Driver tested: AMD Adrenalin 23.12.1 WHQL
- RAM: 16 GB
- Storage: NVMe SSD
- Display: 144 Hz FreeSync monitor

Renderer
- Vulkan (primary issue)
- DX11 works correctly (much shorter load times, no deadlocks)

Main Issues Observed (Vulkan)
- Extremely long loading screens between zones (often 2–4 minutes)
- Long or stalled loading after death / respawn
- Random deadlock errors during some loading screens
- Frequent memory access violations / memory read errors
- Stutters during first minutes in a zone (shader compilation)
- Enemies sometimes invisible after cache rebuild
- Changing graphics settings (especially Texture Quality) can crash the game
- Loading behavior becomes significantly worse if a browser video (YouTube) is playing in background

Despite this, once fully loaded, in-combat performance is very smooth, suggesting the issue is not GPU performance but memory / shader management during transitions.

Steps That Trigger the Issue
- Launch game with Vulkan
- Enter any new area or respawn after death
- Observe very long loading (sometimes appears frozen but eventually completes)
- Issue worsens after crashes, cache rebuilds, or renderer changes

Temporary Workarounds
- Deleting Vulkan shader cache sometimes helps temporarily
- Avoiding background GPU usage (browser hardware acceleration)
- DX11 renderer completely avoids long load times and memory crashes, but with lower performance

Conclusion
Vulkan appears performant but unstable during memory-heavy transitions on AMD RX 7000 GPUs with 16 GB RAM.
The issue seems related to shader compilation, memory allocation, or scene transitions, not raw hardware capability.

It's interesting to hear this is happening on AMD cards, as well.

Running Vulkan, I've found PoE 2 does not play nice with certain web sites in Firefox. Craft of Exile is particularly bad, and causes a PoE to crash almost 100% of the time. Recent patches have made the situation far better than it was (I was ready to quit PoE 2), but the website/Vulkan issue remains.

To resolve long shader loading times, disabling shader cache clean up helped. Currently, the PoE 2 folder is sitting at 133 Gigs, and everything loads very quickly. The only problem I can see you running into here is Windows freezing completely during loading screens, and leaving you no way to dismount drives and protect cache files from corruption. (In Linux, it's possible safely dismount and reboot even when X-Windows is completely locked).

IF you have a way to gracefully shut your system down every time, I would suggest deleting the cache files completely, setting no cache cleanup, then restarting PoE. Your load times will be slow for the first few sessions, but once all the files are downloaded it should be fast.

Merry Christmas

Made a similar post earlier today, having same issues aswell as assets not loading, monsters being invisible and minute long loadtimes.

When i try to switch to direct X i get deadlock and game crashes so i ended up manually wiping shader cache, reinstallet the game and still no better and it started this morning and been fine all untill now.

I'm having the same problem. My specs are similar

Hello,

I copy / paste here, a reply that I did, related to this issue :

Sorry to hear that. Many of us own a similar AMD setup and unfortunately are facing to the same situation.

The most efficient way to avoid these crashes is to rollback on drivers flavor Adrenaline 25.9.2 available here : https://www.amd.com/en/resources/support-articles/release-notes/RN-RAD-WIN-25-9-2.html

--
Some improvements from AMD :

Few days ago AMD has published Adrenalin Edition 26.2.1 Optional, these drivers are available here : https://www.amd.com/en/resources/support-articles/release-notes/RN-RAD-WIN-26-2-1.html

I am testing them since 2 days now and they are stable as the 25.9.2 used to be.

I am playing with the DX12 renderer, GPU : 7900 XT and 5800X3D CPU.

For me, at the moment, these both AMD drivers revision are the best for PoE2, they do not trigger crash of the game. Especially on Spark / CoC.