I had this exact same issue at the end of season 5 almost when they made a patch to D2R and shortly after i launch the game and says “GPU not supported” or something like that. So I updated my GPU Drivers to 515.xx i think at the time. I have tried every version of driver since 47*.+ all the way to 550.. New drivers D2R will load but has the black squares and glitches you describe.
And I had already been playing that whole season with a 980GTX 4GB EVGA with drivers 470.86. Did not get to finish the season, was angry about apples. Devs havn’t done anything about investigating this I do not think. They also have not replied to any of the black box issue posts even for people on supported os’es unlike myself. You actually have a nice computer and have a new gpu which is meant for those newer drivers and still had that problem it seems.
I have heard that if you use OG graphics mode the squares could disappear. I may re upgrade my drivers and test this, but new drivers also mess up one of my other games which then has vulkan issues and crashes to desktop if the nv driver is upgraded.
I seem to remember a few other games totally hard locking my pc on newer drivers at one point in history and it was random sometimes would be once a month or once a hour but it fixed once 470.86 came around so i stuck to that version since. And it isnt my pc’s PSU/hardware issue, this computer has been rock solid runnin 24/7 for years I sometimes reboot once a month or when the power goes out and all other programs work great, AI generation images,vmware workstation, pcem, game emulators, other steam games, compiling tons of source code and using all 64gig of ram for certain tasks and yet to see an issue.
Path of Exile don’t seem to like new drivers, and d2r dont like old drivers(after season 5). POE devs havn’t said anything back either about that vulkan issue.
Seems overall game devs don’t care to look into anything like back in the day when you would ask about something they at least responded to let you know they either don’t care or plan to do something.
So something major is wrong in one of the ecosystems leading up to this game and needs a real investigation be it from driver issues, certain hardware/gpus, api’s, game coding. Who knows what it could be from our perspective since AMD and Intel drivers have similar issues reported.
I couldn’t say what but it needs to be figured out. Good bye $40(now on sale for like 17 and i know why) peace be with you. I may have to just make do and play OG D2:LOD on project D2 1.13. Least there I can make a lan game, and my HC characters don’t lag out and die in the hell blood moor.
Specs:
OS: Slackware 15.0 Linux (kernel 5.15.28LTS, Nvidia 470.86, vulkan libraries 1.3.250)
CPU: 2x Xeon E5-2680 2.5ghz
GPU: 980GTX 4GB EVGA