D3 Can the lag be fixed?

New player here, almost 2 weeks in on a wizard for HC seasonal, I chose HC because I prefer the challenge but I’m currently on GR115 and am unable to do any content where mobs don’t die in the first few seconds anymore because of the massive lag. I’ve tried turning all my settings down, optimizing through geforce experience, trying different settings from google and bnet forums, etc, but this problem will not go away.

I’m running 32GB of corsair vengeance 3200 ram, i7 9700k, gtx 1080 ti gaming trio.

Sometimes it feels like lag, sometimes it’s a straight up freeze for a few second and my character rips across the map and my gcd’s get sped up like 20 times, sometimes its a straight up game freeze for 10-15 seconds and I get control back after having proc’d my enchantress cheat death, sometimes I also proc firebird cheat death, which almost would be game over for me if I froze any longer. If that wasn’t enough, sometimes I just randomly blink and the game crashes and gives some random error report, and then D3 is closed but it’s still technically running somehow so I can’t even “Play D3” from the bnet launcher or end the task, I have to restart my PC just to click “Play D3” because when it crashes it’s stuck on “Playing now”.

What exactly is going on? Every game I play runs more than smooth, no fps or ms issues at all, I play with about 12-20 MS in WoW and over 150 FPS in both wow and d3, and I’ve never had any issues with any other game other than D3.

Also, D3 has some separate issues where it changed the resolution of my actual PC so high that I couldnt see any icons on my screen or even the task manager text, couldn’t navigate chrome or anything else until resetting my PC several times, and sometimes it zooms in so close on the D3 window that my entire 28" monitor is just showing my characters feet and I can’t alt tab, can’t alt f4, can’t do anything but reset again.

The game has become unplayable for me unless I’m farming a neph rift where even if i lag out, I will likely still survive, or farming GR90 for items and paragon, and the minute it becomes too laggy or I don’t feel safe, I tp out and restart the game and waste my keystone because I don’t want to risk dying. Is this how D3 was designed to be played?

Adding an edit here because I forgot to include it but it just happened again to me so it’s also been a recurring issue. When I get the “Impervious to damage” buff, I’ll purposefully look for groups of 2 elite mobs and chain them together and stand in the middle to explosive blast them down, but sometimes I just get 1 shot and die which procs my enchantress or firebird 2pc again. What exactly is happening to me if I’m supposed to be “Impervious to ALL damage”? The buff wasn’t worn off either.

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Like half the community has this freezing issue. There’s a topic around that can help you fix the issue. Either you change a file or you hope that some settings in your sounds fixes it. Sometimes GPU stuff, sometimes CPU stuff. Who really knows. It could be fixed but they are deciding not to fix it since last year, even though they said they would figure it out.

I’ve unfortunately tried changing a file, I can’t remember exactly what I did but it was on one of the forum topics, as well as changed my sound to 16bit or whatever, down from 32, and I even tried playing with all sound completely off, I’ve toyed with all graphics settings and set everything to absolute lowest (which only makes it worse), I think the game needs to perform specific graphics at a certain degree or it will cause more lag, so I’ve re-enabled my recommended graphics through GeForce Experience, but overall all of this wouldn’t be as annoying if it actually helped or did anything, but it doesn’t. The fact that people have to search for these fixes and they still don’t actually fix the problem is a huge concern for a game that has sold 10s of millions of copies. Can anyone at blizzard comment on this issue or how to fix it? Or give an update on how this issue is being worked on? I recently quit WoW for several different reasons that I’m sure a lot of the community shares the sentiment on, and after trying to get into D3 I realize that this will just be a casual game to play on weekends when super bored because as mentioned, it’s unplayable on HC at a certain point. Even though I haven’t been playing D3 very long, I’ve sunk an enormous amount of time in the last 2 weeks into it and I feel robbed knowing I won’t even be able to use my hard work to push any higher.

Even tho your card is capable of running high fps, the truth is the game is older and its based on 60 fps, for laughs and giigles try setting your verticle sync to enable and play the game at 60 fps settings. Its possible your card is throttling up and down causing lag spikes.

The real question is: Can D3 be fixed?

After searching through dozens of posts I found 2 things that drastically reduce the stutter/freeze issues if not completely eliminate them IF DONE PROPERLY.

  1. Download Starcraft - Inside the (programs X86) folder got to Starcraft>Support64 and find the file: Fmodex64_4_44_23.dll Right click and copy it and paste it to your desktop and rename it Fmodex64.dll.
    1b. AFTER STARTING THE LAUNCHER, click the new Fmodex64.dll and copy/paste it into your Diablo 3 folder under (programs X86) and choose “replace existing file”

  2. START THE GAME NOW, once inside the game hit Crtl+Alt+Delete and open Task Manager. Right click on the “Diablo III Retail” and choose “Go to details”. Once it goes to details right click on “DiabloIII64.exe” and choose “Set Affinity” and then uncheck everything except CPU 0 and CPU 1.

I put a shortcut to my Programsx86 on my desktop to make this process easier. You will have to follow these steps every time you close the D3 program but I have only had lag once in the last month and I suspect my ISP was responsible for it.

The devs have been aware of these issues but I think their attention is more focused on new releases upcoming and less on an older game with almost zero revenue.

Good Luck!

Simply put no. The engine couldn’t support the numbers being pumped. ITS ALL ABOUT BIGGER NUMBERS!