When I first bought the game it ran fine, I was running Windows 10 at the time. I played a bunch when it first came out but took a long break (until now!), however after updating the game performance has tanked, and changing the in-game settings seems to have no effect.
My GPU is pegged at 100% usage all the time regardless of the in-game settings, using 250watts of power.
Visually, changing the settings does seem to make things look worse, but my FPS remains at around 30 (regardless of changes, ultra is 30fps and low is 30fps) but the frame pacing is nauseating, up in the 100s of milliseconds.
I’ve seen quite a few complaints about the problem that just seem to get swept under the rug because the issue doesn’t happen to everyone, but I’d like to gather some data.
So if you have this problem I want to know:
Do you have Resizable BAR enabled?
Did you upgrade to Windows 11 from 10?
Do you use automatic memory profiling like XMP?
Have you made any hardware changes since you first installed Diablo 2 Resurrected? (I did fully uninstall D2R as a precaution but it persisted after).
Do you have Geforce Experience optimizing the game settings by chance?
Maybe there is some external program like that which is overriding the in-game settings.
The game reads/writes the graphics settings to Settings.json in this location:
C:\Users(your username)\Saved Games\Diablo II Resurrected
You can open with Settings.json with Notepad. Maybe try changing the settings in-game and just verify the settings are actually changing in that file. For example as a quick test you could try switching to Windowed mode and chose a lower resolution in-game, then close the game and inspect that file to verify if it actually saved properly.
No I’m not using the GeForce optimizer, nor any overlays like discord or Xbox game bar.
To be clear, changing the settings has a visual effect (low looks worse than high for example) but has no effect on GPU utilization and frame rate (always using 100%, max power) the only thing that boosted frame rate by like 10fps was using DRS but these specs should be able to play this game on low at native res over 60fps like it used to.
UPDATE:
So I figured out the issue, it seems although I didn’t have MSI Afterburner running, my configuration of it was still saved, when I was messing around with power limits.
My GPU was only getting 10% of its maximum power budget, so it showed up as 100% usage even when it was only drawing about 90 watts of power.
I made this change and the game is running normally again. Sorry about the confusion and hope someone sees this if they have similar confusing results in the future.