During the early access open beta for Diablo IV last weekend, there were some reports of the game bricking 3080 Ti video cards. Recently, a Blizzard customer support rep posted on the official forums confirming that Blizzard and Nvidia are looking into the issues and what’s causing them. While most of the reports involve Gigabyte’s 3080 Ti video card, there have been some random ones with other video cards. Last weekend, I experienced no issues while playing the game on my computer, but today was a bit different.
After waiting in queue and getting in, I created my Necromancer and started the campaign. I quickly noticed that performance was a bit strange, and the game was stuttering quite a bit. I did have some performance issues last weekend, but it was mostly around crowded areas. Now the game was stuttering at the very beginning, where there weren’t any other players nearby. After a few minutes of playing, all three of my monitors went black and into standby mode, meaning the video card wasn’t sending a signal to any of them. I looked over at my PC and noticed none of the lights on the video card were lit, so I quickly powered down the entire computer.
I waited a few minutes before booting it back up, and got the latest drivers from Nvidia for my 3080 Founder’s Edition. After updating, I started Diablo IV up again and waited in queue, but this time I observed the temperatures on my video card, which were randomly spiking to 90-degrees Celsius. After loading in, I was able to complete the first part of the introduction but after zoning, all three monitors went black again. Now I’m getting a little concerned, because I have a 3080 Founder’s Edition and not a 3080 Ti, so the issue is definitely affecting other video cards. It’s all strange to me since I didn’t have any issues last weekend, so maybe the new patch did something?
The only fix that seems to have gotten the game stable for me is setting the “Max Frame Rate” setting in Nvidia Control Panel to 175 FPS. So far, I’ve only made it to Kyovashad before deciding to stop playing for the time being. I may put in some more hours this evening to see if it’s stable, but it is a bit worrying that there are issues with my 3080 Founder’s Edition, and I’m not a fan of seeing such high temperatures on the card while playing Diablo IV. There’s a memory leak of some sort too, since my Task Manager is showing Diablo IV is using 14,882.2 MB of memory. You can learn more about my PC setup here.
