If it’s failing to initialize DirectX / D3D then there’s a problem with 1 of 3 things: the drivers, DirectX (which is built into Windows itself so we will consider this a Windows/OS issue) or the GPU hardware. There’s another possibility that another piece of software is trying to hook into the game client and causing issues, such as overlays (Discord, Game bar, Nvidia overlay, etc.). However, a background program conflict could be ruled out by rebooting using Selective Startup to disable all startup process and non-Microsoft services.
Press Windows Key+R.
Type msconfig and press Enter.
Select Selective startup and uncheck Load startup items.
Select the Services tab.
Check Hide all Microsoft services.
Note: Skipping this step may prevent your computer from rebooting correctly.
Click Disable all.
Click Apply then click OK.
Click Restart.
Driver issues we’ve already covered with DDU and reinstalling the latest drivers.
If it is a Windows / DirectX issue then you should be able to repair any damaged/corrupt files with a System File Checker scan. Other options would be to reset Windows 10, or do a fresh reformat and reinstall of the OS.
The temperatures you’re seeing sound fine. 60C max for CPU and 73C max for GPU would not be considered overheating for your hardware, so we can rule out overheating as an issue. There are issues that can occur with GPUs other than overheating, such as instability from a factory overclock, but we can’t really get into how to test by underclocking the GPU since that is outside of our scope. Since the white screen issue is only occurring 1 out of 20 times that leads me to believe the root cause is some kind of instability with the hardware, otherwise it should be occurring every time you launched the game. Also pointing to hardware issues are the LiveKernelEvent 141s in the Windows error logs.
As far as the Diablo 3 client itself, we aren’t aware of any major bugs or issues that would cause this to be happening. If it were an issue with the client as well we would be seeing a massive amount of reports of people getting the same issues on launch. I’m afraid there’s not much else that we can have you troubleshoot with the client that would help with this, other than possibly lowering the game settings to see if that reduces the chances of it happening. With your hardware though you shouldn’t have to lower settings to get stability, even if that does help.
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The problem arrived after installation: but I honestly don’t recall if it was a game patch that caused it, a GPU driver update, or a Windows update. Heck, could even be a change to a disk configuration. I seem to recall it happened when I selected 4k resolution. Though I’ve tried going back to frame rate limits, 1k, and even windowed, all with no effect on the white screen at startup.
So it’s back to: since Diablo is the only affected application that has an issue with D3D, it is automatically suspect. I even installed Steam to run diagnostics - it and every other diagnostic I have found to run says my system is operating very well. This also points to app software: Diablo.
Then there are enough threads out in Google-Land all describing this issue - so it lends credence to my doubt it is hardware related.
Also - and as an aside - I once discovered the Blizzard app phoning up Facebook servers … (NetMonitor and WireShark are fair tools for snooping at what apps are really doing web-wise) - and since I have many FB servers blocked at the firewall, that was causing some issues. This could be related to that.
Depending on how long ago this was, this could have been due to the ability to stream your play session. They discontinued the inbuilt streaming in October 2019 according to the “What’s New” patch notes in the Battlenet app.
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I installed EVGA’s overclocking scanner tool: it reports I have lots of headroom to overclock my stock gpu; so I doubt my gpu is failing. It also installed tons of old DirectX support stuff. But I’ve seen no change in behavior. All the Xbox features are off, including DVR modes, etc. But I’ll next fully turn off Win10 GameMode – which is supposed to reduce game interference – and report back.
Update 2: Still weirdness… Game Mode OFF has mo effect. I’ve also done some rather intrusive tests and rebuilds and still have the “Diablo III - Can’t Initialize D3D” issue. Multiple drivers, full system scans and rebuilds.
Also, game stutter has always been an issue. So I thought perhaps I am pushing things too much, too far. Playing today tried watching frame rates. I dropped res from 1980 down to 1440. Frame rate hovers around 200 nominal. Stutters plenty at 200 fps. It isn’t frame rate related. Using HW Monitor, CPU shows 28% maximum utilization. GPU shows running at 99%, to be expected. Isn’t a CPU problem, either. Could be network, but I maintain a solid 10G internal network and have a 230Mbps/20ms link to my ISP.
Update 3: Just replaced my GTX1080 with a new RTX2070 … exactly the same issue. So much for blaming the video card. Oddly, frame rate has dropped from 200 fps down to about 165 fps… lmao.
For what it is worth, just so you are aware this is not unique to your system, I have also been fighting this four letter word through the past two seasons. Oddly enough for me it manifests differently, I get random boots from the game with a nice long error code to report with, (not to healthy for Hard Core players hahahaha) and it’s always caused by the following, according to the Debugtxt.
***** UNHANDLED EXCEPTION: ACCESS_VIOLATION (c0000005)
Stack Crawl:
00007FFAFB7AA45D nvwgf2umx.dll OpenAdapter12+2271741
00007FFAFB7AA309 nvwgf2umx.dll OpenAdapter12+2271401
00007FFAFB7A0E6D nvwgf2umx.dll OpenAdapter12+2233357
00007FFAFC06E7EA nvwgf2umx.dll NVAPI_Thunk+1076314
00007FFAFC7292DC nvwgf2umx.dll NVAPI_Thunk+8132428
00007FFB45B96FD4 KERNEL32.DLL BaseThreadInitThunk+20
00007FFB463FCEC1 ntdll.dll RtlUserThreadStart+33
7 frames dumped
Just thought I would put it out there so you would know, it’s not unique to your system but it is unique to Blizzard games, I never get this on ANY OTHER games or programs no matter how stressing. (D3 doesn’t even turn my fans on).
Cheers and good luck
Not that anyone will ever see this but on the off chance, nvwgf2umx.dll issues, such as nvwgf2umx.dll NVAPI Thunk, nvwgf2umx.dll OpenAdapter, etc al … have been found to be associated to RAM memory issues. You can start looking for recommendations in the Nvidia Geforce Forums, I could not post the link because you know, why should we be able to help each other. I can not say it has fixed my problem, still too soon but no crashes as yet after 24 hours.
To post a link:
- put the link in your message as you would normally,
- highlight the entire link,
- click the </> button on the formatting bar (to the right of the double quotes) .
This will convert the link to preformatted text and make it acceptable to the forums.
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I stand corrected, thank you.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/discover/282414/is-this-a-driver-problem-or-a-game-problem-/
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Blizzard has - it seems - decided this is a non-issue for them.
Hey again Eridani,
Due to the complexity of this issue and the amount of troubleshooting you’ve already done it’s unlikely we would be able to solve this one over the forums. We could take a look again, but we’d want to get an MSINFO file from you and that isn’t something we want to have posted here.
If you’d like us to dig deeper into this and see if there’s anything else within our scope of support that we can recommend, go ahead and submit a ticket. Make sure to include your DXDIAG, MSINFO, the list of every step you’ve done so far, and a link to this forum thread. Thanks!