Game crashes on spell (lighting?) effects if "Environmental Detail" greater than "Low"

[edit2]
Crashed again. The driver rollback made the game much more stable, I think, but I created a crash again by manufacturing as many vfx as I could in a single game: WSK and Baal run, defeating Shenk and casting blizzard during the catapult frenzy, then crashed at Trav coucil about 10 seconds later. Game log just terminates; system logs show a driver fail/recovery at the kernel level.

[edit]
Well, since I can’t bump this to report it’s resolved (and thereby share the fix) until “another user has participated,” I’ll just edit here to say this is fixed. This is what I wanted to bump with:

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Following advice of users in https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d2r/t/black-box-texturesanimations-in-some-acts/6457/3, I rolled back driver to NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready 472.12. I can confirm, as others have in the linked thread, this fixed my problem. There appears to be a texture issue with the newer NVIDIA driver, either globally or for Win11.

Will note for others, my machine shipped with 472.12, and I upgraded it on the advice of a blue due to the black load screen error so many people are reporting. The upgrade worked, but not because of the driver version. I did a clean install and then optimized, which means GeForce overwrote the D2R in-game client video config. I probably could have clean installed the same driver version and fixed the black screen error without introducing the texture error.

Anyway, this is fixed, many thanks to the users in the other thread for sorting this out.

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[original]
Brand new machine, unboxed yesterday. Tested my other battle.net games as well as some Steam games, and everything is working perfectly. D2R has been nothing but problems. I finally got it to a playable state by force-overwriting the OOTB in-game video configuration using GeForce Experience, but the play experience is very poor because I have to run worse graphics than I used on my 10-year-old computer.

I’ve isolated it (I think) to Environmental Detail. So far no crashes when it’s set to “Low.” Anything higher, and I have at least 80% crash rate any time the following are on the screen:

  • Hydra
  • Lightning (e.g. from a soul)
  • Witch death (the combustion effect)
  • Blizzard
  • Possibly others, e.g. Council red lightning

Sometimes it crashes immediately. Other times, I know I’m about to crash because all the aforementioned effects have a visible transparency—like the item drop labels—quadrangular around the vfx. It’s almost like, “This is supposed to be transparent but I can’t do that anymore, so I’ll show it without the transparency oh no I crashed.”

My machine:

  • Windows 11
  • ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Hero
  • 12th Gen Intel Core i7-12700K
  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti (8 GB)
  • 32 GB 5200mhz DDR5
  • 1000W titanium-rated PSU
  • GeForce Game Ready driver ver. 511.65 (rel. 2/1/2022)

If you’re telling me that can’t run this game, I don’t even know what to think about that. If a blue or green responds, please don’t link the “how to deal with crashes” article because a) I’ve done all that, and b) I can isolate and reproduce it, so those generic instructions are useless here.

Sorry to be frustrated. Would appreciate some help. This is really, really annoying/disappointing.

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