Freeze, gears, back

Forget about it. They will never find a damn fix. It will never go away. Your only solution is to switch to Vulkan. It will remove the crashes, but the overall performance will be poorer. Also RTX 5080 here, with 9800X3D.

It's insane how you literally cannot play this game on DirectX12 with such hardware. It will crash every single time, once every 2 maps or so. Drivers doesn't matter, nothing matters. It just crashes again and again and again. You are chasing a ghost trying to fix this while staying on DX12.

Super common, even happens in poe 1. You can actually press escape while it's "thinking" with the gears, and the game will come back as paused so you don't die from it. Obviously doesn't work if it happens in a no-pause boss fight, but works in maps!

I love it when it freezes like that, you can still hear things are going on. The gears pop up, and then when it comes back.

Dead.

It’s really, really, annoying when that happened on my level 93 hardcore SSF

This is a crash. They implemented a 'fix' some time back that would reload the game without completely shutting down the program. Try changing the renderer to Vulkan if you haven't already. I still experience crashes pretty regularly, often completely shutting down the game.

Had the exact same issue this league, worked fine previously, even still does in POE1, but something in the new league broke things with Nvidia cards for a lot of people. I have a 5090 and when using DX12 which is what I've always used, I get your exact same issue. Updating drivers over the past 2 months multiple times never helped. The only thing that fixed it for me was switching to Vulkan, it stopped the issue completely and haven't had an issue with it yet. Performance isn't as great as DX12, but I'm still max FPS 99% of the time anyway so not a big deal. Keep hoping they'll fix whatever they broke, but I've given up hope at this point.

When it was happening, I just got in the habit of slamming ESC key as soon as it happened, that way the game is paused even though you can't see what's going on, no risk of dying. THen just wait until the game comes back, unpause and have fun for 30 minutes until it happens again.

Thx everyone wanted to make sure it wasn’t an issue on my end. Knowing it’s a common issue makes me feel better it doesn’t really bother me too much I think it pauses my game for me and has never gotten me killed

Could try deleting the shader cache but yeah who knows if that’ll work

Go Vulkan, don't look back.

After switching to Vulkan I had maybe 1-2 sessions where at the beginning I had some weird input delay but has been buttery smooth since then for like 2 weeks now. For over a week before that on direct 12 I had the same issues. Freeze, cog wheel, load back in. Easily happened every 30-45 minutes and had a few crashes too.

I've heard there's a certain graphics driver you can roll back to if you want to keep using direct 12 but that felt like more of a hassle than just trying Vulkan.

There's a bug in nvidia drivers when the gpu suddenly goes offline. Been since last spring i think, never fixed apparently (that's on nvidia). Black screen and gears you see is the recovery system GGG implemented, before that it would just perma-freeze/crash.

You can test vulkan as the others suggested, but i actually had another bug with vulkan, where the game starts writing gigabytes of shaders per hour and never ever stops.

Switch your renderer to Vulkan, it fixed this issue for me