after last weekend Diablo IV Open beta, reports flooded in saying the game could break Nvidia graphics cards. This means various crashes and subpar performance, as well as outright dead GPUs.
Fortunately, not all cards are affected, and there are steps you can take to protect yourself. Here we know.
After a long wait many players rushed to play Diablo IV during its open beta weekend. The anticipated entry in one of Blizzard’s most successful franchises isn’t one of the most demanding games this year, so most modern gaming rigs should be able to handle it just fine — and they did. Most PCs turned out to be safe, but some users were in for a very unpleasant surprise when their GPU stopped working.
So far, all reports point to the problem being with a specific type of card — Nvidia’s RTX 3080 Ti, manufactured by Gigabyte. It appears that cards made by other manufacturers are safe, but until Blizzard or Nvidia addresses the issue it never hurts to be extra careful.
Those who ran into problems reached out to Reddit and the Blizzard forums to report the issue. Some gamers experienced crashes, in which the monitor shuts itself off and required players to reboot the entire PC. Others, like mkp0203 on Reddit, have noticed that their graphics cards have died completely.
“while playing diablo For about 20 minutes, during a cutscene in the chapel, my monitors went off. Had to restart my pc and the motherboard is now posting error code 97. nothing is working. My GPU is dead,” said the Reddit user.
The problem is not that severe for everyone, and it is hard to estimate how many users are affected by it. Amazon’s New World It faced a similar problem initially, and it even shut down some of the best GPUs including the RTX 3090 Ti.
In any case, you probably don’t need to avoid the game altogether if you want to be extra safe. One way to prevent this problem is to limit the maximum frames per second (FPS) on your GPU, not just in games. It is also recommended that you do not overclock the card while playing Diablo IVBecause this puts extra pressure on the GPU.
If you want to limit the frame rate for a while, you’ll need to open your Nvidia Control Panel, right-click on your desktop to launch it, then scroll down to Manage 3D Settings, there, make sure max frame rate Enabled, and set it to the same fps as your monitor’s refresh rate. Even if you’ve done this before, you may need to do it again after updating drivers, as these settings can sometimes be reset during that time.
If you notice a drop in performance while gaming, it’s probably best to quit the game rather than strain your GPU. It’s unclear whether Gigabyte will replace the broken RTX 3080 Ti GPU for free, so it’s better to be safe than sorry. We’ll need to hear from Blizzard, Gigabyte, or Nvidia to know exactly what’s going on, and will update this article when we do.
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