Following last weekend’sDiablo IVopen beta, reports came flooding in saying that the game might be breaking Nvidia graphics cards. This means various crashes and subpar performance, as well as even outright dead GPUs.
Fortunately, not all cards are affected, and there are steps you’re able to take to protect yourself. Here’s what we know.
After a long wait, many players rushed to playDiablo IVduring its open beta weekend. The anticipated entry in one of Blizzard’s most successful franchises is not one of themost demanding games this year, so the majority of modern gaming rigs should be able to handle it just fine — and they did. Most PCs came out unscathed, but some users were met with a very unpleasant surprise when their GPUs stopped working.
So far, all reports point to there being a problem with one specific type of card — Nvidia’sRTX 3080 Ti, manufactured by Gigabyte. It appears that cards made by other manufacturers are safe, but it never hurts to take extra precautions until Blizzard or Nvidia addresses the issue.
Those who ran into problems rushed to Reddit and Blizzard forums to report the issue. Some gamers experienced crashes, including monitors turning themselves off and players needing to reboot the entire PC. Others, like mkp0203 onReddit, saw their graphics card completely die.
“While playingDiablofor about 20 minutes, during a cutscene in the chapel, my monitors turned 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 quite so severe for everyone, and it’s hard to estimate how many users are affected by this. Amazon’sNew Worldinitially suffered from a similar problem, and it also bricked some of thebest GPUs, including theRTX 3090 Ti.
In any case, if you want to be extra safe, you probably don’t have to avoid the game entirely. One way to prevent this issue is to limit the maximum frames per second (fps) on your GPU and not just in the game. It’s also recommended that you don’t overclock the card while playingDiablo IV, as that puts an extra strain on the GPU.
If you want to limit the frame rate for the time being, you’ll need to open up yourNvidia Control Panel, right-click on your desktop to launch it, then scroll down toManage 3D Settings. In there, make sure thatMax Frame Rateis enabled, and set it to the same fps as your monitor’s refresh rate. Even if you did this before, you might 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 than strain your GPU. It’s unclear whether Gigabyte will be replacing the broken RTX 3080 Ti GPUs free of charge, so it’s better to be safe than sorry. We’ll need to hear from Blizzard, Gigabyte, or Nvidia to know what’s really going on, and will update this article when we do.
