Fixed random game pausing

So I recently was having an issue with the game suddenly stopping for 10 seconds and then would recover and continue normally for random periods of time and then would lock up again. Though the action while frozen like that was still going and often I would come out of the frozen screen. Dead. I have since discovered after many hours of testing that changing the core affinity of the game (which cores the app uses while running) has completely fixed the problem. I have a 6 core 12 thread cpu and I set my affinity to use only cores 5,6,7,8. I tried just using 2 cores but game was choppy. 4 seemed to be perfect. Though those with better systems may be able use just 2 and be fine.

You can do it manually each time you run the game or run a script from your desktop.
For my script it looks like this.

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c start “Diablo 3” /High /affinity 1E0 “d:\Diablo3\Diablo III\Diablo III.exe”

You can right click your desktop, choose new shortcut, and paste the command text above into the location field and your good to go (this is for windows 10 pathing so it may differ if your not running windows 10). Be sure to replace my HEX number with your HEX if you wish to use different cores.

The 3 digits after the word affinity are the core addresses in HEX. So there is a binary to HEX conversion you will need to do if you want to assign different cores.

You can hex converters online, seems forum won’t let me put links.

To find out your binary core number you have to count your cores and assign a 1 to the cores you wish to use and a zero to the ones you don’t. Cores are listed highest to lowest left to right for this example.

Example: For me, I have 12 cores. So you write down on a piece of paper 0000111100000 because I want to use cores 5,6,7,8. . And when you input 0000111100000 in a converter to hex to get 1E0.

There are lots of information on setting affinity so if this doesn’t make sense then google can probably help you as well.

Hope you find this useful.

Cheers.

2 Likes

Interesting, thanks for the tip. I’ve seen this 10 second freeze myself and it is quite annoying. I’ll have to try it out.

Blizzard? Are you taking notes? :slight_smile:

but you know that there was a patch last week that fixed this issue, right?

3 Likes

Oh they did? Oops. Haven’t been playing much D3 lately. :slight_smile:

Well I spent the time messing around with the command, so here’s my report:

I was not able to get the game to load with the OP command, even after I made it reflect the path on my system.
Here’s what I had to do to create a working shortcut with on my desktop:

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c start "Diablo 3" /High /Affinity # "c:\program files (x86)\Diablo iii\diablo iii.exe" -launch

More details about setting the /Affinity #…
The bit value is actually backwards, so 11110000, or HEX F0 represents cores 5,6,7,8.
Here are some examples:
F=Cores 1,2,3,4
AA=Cores 2,4,6,8
55=Cores 1,3,5,7
F0=Cores 5,6,7,8
F00=Cores 9,10,11,12
F000=Cores 13,14,15,16

I have a 24 thread CPU and tested it on 5,6,7,8 as well as 9,10,11,12 and confirmed it is using the specified cores with task manager.

Another thing, without the -launch, it just loads the battle.net app and doesn’t launch the game. Also with the -launch, you will have to enter your password and authenticator code every time.

Except it didn’t…

4 characters required

I’ve been running this fix long before the patch and I wanted to be sure it was a working fix before posting my findings. But if it was a blizzard issue to begin with Im glad they fixed it for all players :slight_smile:

Cheers!

The recent patch wasn’t for fixing the freezing issues. There was a blue post about it.

When they patch the freezing issues, I expect them to announce that bigtime. Even before that patch hits…

Yes it was…

1 Like

For this script, can it work with the game already open? Or does this script launch the game and apply the affinity afterwards?

Yup, it was. I can actually mutiplay now. Before the patch it was a freezathon.

1 Like

they didn’t? but they did…

You can also set affinity in Windows 10 by starting the game, opening task manager. Find Diablo.exe ( either 32 or 64 bit, depending on what you are using), right click it and choose Set Affinity then click or unclick the boxes to each core.

If the Blizz fix did not help with some of your game issues, then this is really not a bad idea. A lot of older games have issues with multi core cpus today and this is a well known fix for some isses.

P.S. You can also try setting a lower Priority in the same right click box.
(But also if its working great don’t change settings, If its not broke don’t fix it.)

Edited: I posted incorrectly I said higher priority when I meant lower, this only helps if your getting bad cpu bottlenecks.

A nice program for setting up cores if you don,t want to go the command line route.

THG Task Assignment Manager

Couple of suggestions:

Be sure to use at least 2, and not more than 4 cores. The game was not optimized for more than 4. Multi-threaded CPUs (hyperthread for example) means you have both physical and virtual cores. Preferably, you want to use physical cores if possible. Or just use 4 in numerical order if you don’t know for sure.

Do not change the priority. That can cause adverse effects on other parts of the system. Increasing the priority of an app can cause the system to ignore other processes too much or completely if you were to set it too high resulting in crashes or freezes. You are best off to just leave it at normal. There is no real reason to change this.

Useless fix is useless…

Nothing has changed for me and from what I can tell a whole lot of others as well. I’ m about to give up on Diablo. I’m constantly changing screen resolutions up and down and disabling the sound. It seems to fix the issue temporarily and then it goes back to slow loading inventory and stash. I don’t freeze totally but it is so laggy that you can barely move and then all of a sudden the game catches up and works fine for a couple minutes and then the lag starts again. The best luck I have had is setting the video to the lowest setting and disabling the sound. However, who wants to play a game with circa 1990 graphics with no sound?

I’m only in my first full season of playing but it is clear these problems are not the individual players hardware or ISP. Looking through this forum it is clear these issues have been prevalent for a very long time and never seem to get fixed. All kinds of temporary fixes/advice but nothing that gets rid of the problems permanently. Do console players have these kind of issues or is it just PC/MAC?

Makes you wonder if Diablo 3 has become a bit of an after thought with Diablo 2 and 4 coming out. Is battlenet/blizzard just biding their time with Diablo 3 waiting for it to be replaced with 4?

Sad part is, I honestly have none of these issues at all. I haven’t had any play quality issues in this game for a long time in fact.

Most of the problems I run into are problems with my end of things or the internet being crap.

What I have noticed is that the number of recent complaints point to a potential issue of newer hardware/newer OS potentially causing some issues.

My newest system is a 7th gen i5 with a 1660. But that doesn’t explain why my father’s new Omen 10th gen laptop works the game perfectly fine, and his has a 2060!

Yes. No computer that I have used to play this game has acted the way many of you are complaining about. So what do I have setup different that allows mine to work fine and some of yours to work like crap?

You have to wonder.

Game on.

o.0 For me suddenly the game would freeze and the ping would go up to 1000+ for no reason…
and then Error 1016 pops LOL
Blizzard really needs to fix their servers…