Demons and monsters may not be the only things that Diablo IV players are inadvertently killing. In a scenario that seems reminiscent of the GPU drama that surrounded Amazon’s MMORPG, New World, a growing number of Diablo IV players are taking to social media and other online channels to complain about how Blizzard’s new game is crashing, or, worse, bricking, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards. Some of the vendors that have been named include GIGABYTE and EVGA, and while many have suggested that this is strictly a hardware issue and that the developer isn’t to blame, Blizzard has confirmed that it is investigating reports of the GPU issues, which appear to be increasing. Diablo IV is currently available to play as part of an early beta phase, while its open beta will run from March 24 to 26.
From the Blizzard forums:
I got to the church where the flashback scene plays then fans on my GPU went to max, all three monitors went black and I then killed the power. Smelled that burnt electronics smell. Waited a bit then tried to power back on and monitors stayed black. After a bit killed power popped open my case tried to power back on. MOBO has post error lights and shows a solid white, which means error with video card. My Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080TI is dead in the water.
It also killed my PNY RTX 3080. After playing for a couple hours, screen went black and i couldnt do anything but hard reset. Restarted the game and it happened again after a few minutes. Then i started getting black screen without the game running, just while using Windows. No OC enabled or anything. I did a clean driver reinstall and it was still happening after a couple minutes of booting up. I left the pc alone and went to sleep thinking it’s toast. Today i opened it up and checked all connections just in case. I also plugged in my monitor cable to a different dp port. So far it has been running for hours without issues. Fingers crossed it stays that way. I also played about 30 mins of D4 with lower settings and it was fine. After seeing this thread and a few other reports on reddit I will not be loading this beta again until we know more. This could be an issue which affects 3080 and 3080ti cards just like New World bug fried evga cards.
My graphics card also burned out. While playing, the fans of my Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 Ti suddenly started running at maximum speed. At the same time, the signal from the monitor disappeared. After turning off the power and trying to turn it back on, I couldn’t get it to work anymore. The card is just under a year old. It happened during a cutscene with flowers when they showed a snowy landscape.
there are over 50 reports so far with 3080ti cards frying while playing this game. you can think whatever you can, but yes, a game can override a firmware if a hacking is done behind scenes for some stuff.
From the Diablo subreddit:
While playing Diablo for about 20 minutes, during a cutscene in the chapel, my monitors turned off. Had to restart my PC and motherboard is now posting error code 97. Nothing is working. My GPU is dead. Hope to get some clarity from Blizzard.
Gigabyte GEFORCE RTX 3080ti OC gaming bricked. pretty much cut and paste. double black screens card fans went to max. swapped pci ports, nothing. put my old 1080 back in boots just fine.
Exactly the same happened to me with my Gigabite 3080 TI just an hour ago, playing Diablo IV. Black screen, all fans 100%.Put in my old gpu, pc booted perfectly. Retried with 3080 TI, but alas, totally bricked. UPDATE. Ran D4 again mondaymorning, with framecap on 60 (on my superwide screen). To my astonishment, the card didn’t even get near-hot, and fans kept spinning superlow. I monitored fans & temp during those hours & no peaks appeared at all, while on saturday, the card was constantly running at max. D4 really does need to introduce a framecap asap.
Had a similar issue as well (RTX 3080 TI). It happened during gameplay (char stopped in a town) and then suddenly the screen blacked out and the GPU fans started spinning crazy fast. I had to hard reboot the PC. Luckily my GPU started working normally after that.
Discussion (13 replies)
Join Discussion →Wow!
no no, diablo
I was wondering if anyone would see a pun in that!
Here we go again.
No game or compute load is capable of bricking any GPU, unless the GPU has some other defect.
There are no exceptions to this rule.
I remember when Civilization V first came out and the 2k forums were hit by a stream of players who claimed that Civilization V had bricked their 9800GT's (when the true culprit was Nvidias well poublicized solder issue which they never dealt with)
It wasn't true for Civilization V, it wasn't true for New World and it isn't true for Diablo IV.
It won't ever be true for any software, unless it is something like MSI Afterburner messing with voltages or something else.
No, its possible that it can run a card at high fps in menus, cinematics or certain maps/modes that will expose flaws in weak gpu components. I've got two games recently that are ramping up my gpu when they shouldn't be. A new card game that at 60fps ramps up the fans to 2500rpm unless I cap it at 30fps in nvidia control panel. The game has min specs of a 1st gen intel and GTX 770. Total War Warhammer3 has had a known issue with its campaign map for a year now that seems to make some cards run at 100% utilization and high fan speeds. The battles usually run smoother even with hundreds of units on screen.
Yes, that is possible.
But, as a general rule:
Hardware should always protect itself from run-away conditions. Failure to do so is a flaw - be it in exposing otherwise weak components or manufacturing issues or “user error” or inadequate thermal protection.
Running at 100% and just having fans ramped up isn’t a flaw per se, it’s lack of optimization — but bricking the card definitely is a flaw.
It's not that simple. The game is doing the equivavlent of putting a car to the limiter consistently for no reason. It should not brick engines, but you know it will if done too much especially older more performance than reliability tuned engines. The problem is that GPUs have no hard rev limiter. Now should there be one is another question which must be put to nvidia.
The reference 30 series is known to have voltage/transient spike issues.
If software exposes this hardware defect that is still on the hardware.
Imagine if a CPU randomly spiking to 100% caused the CPU to fail. It wouldn't be on the software.
Engine comparison would be if redline is 6000rpm and when you told the engine to go to 6000rpm for a split second it instead went to 9000rpm+
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Hard means hardware.
I don't see how high framerate would do damage or expose underlying GPU flaws.
You could have one older and lighter title load the GPU less at 300fps at lower resolutions, and have a modern title at high resolutions load the GPU more at 60fps.
Framerate is a mostly irrelevant metric here.
I've pretty much decided to go this route on PS5 anyway.
In this scenario the framerate ingame was capped and then in a cutscene it would go to likely 1000+ in an instant which can and will either trip OCP and/or kill any card not built to handle the instant increase in load