Game Temporarily Freezing After 45 minutes to an Hour

Setup: RTX 5090, Ryzen 9800X3D, 32GB DDR5 Ram, Ethernet 1 Gig

After the 0.2 patch after a certain amount of time my game consistently locks up. I can still hear sound but I can't control anything, the cursor just does a blue pinwheel animation, then I see the grinding gears loading animation, and after a few seconds I can continue playing but all my map progress up until that point will have been lost. This makes playing the endgame such a risk because I risk wasting a map or losing a fight due to uncontrollable circumstances. I have tried running my GPU and CPU at stock settings with no difference. I've also tried updating my drivers, which only make the issue worse by adding visual artifacts when my game freezes. So for now, I've rolled my Nvidia driver back to Feb 28. I never encountered this issue before the recent patch. I've also rolled back all Windows Updates post 0.2 patch with no effect. All of this leads me to suspect the issue stems from POE2.

Same problem.

Same problem. I don't get why it even starts loading every texture again. The game already takes some time to load a map. Bad performance and coding. I hope they fix this.

I have learned from a clip in a interview with the developers that this is the result of a Nvidia driver issue. Apparently there is a unresolved error in the driver that causes the game to crash after a certain period of time. Instead of crashing, devs implemented a workaround where PoE2 will recover and re-login to the game. So while your game doesn't technically crash, because of this you still lose your map data, your character is frozen but you can still hear audio, and your whole screen is black. Not great, barely playable but that's what I've discovered so far.