FPS drops in serious fights

General Discussion
1

Hello i want some feeback from people if they have any experiences with heavy fps drops in serious fights.

When im in city i have 100-130fps but sometimes when i play rifts in party with speedbuild, everybody running like crazy, a lot of mobs dying around i notice drops in fps up to 30, what really dont help me, and i was thinking isnt that a little bit too much drop ? Like, of course staying in city and rift in party is difference but even though…

My PC is:
CPU - Intel Core i5 6500
Graphic - GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
Ram - DDR4 16Gb 3000MHz

2

Try dropping your sound channels to a lower setting.

If the game is set to 128 channels and your soundcard only has the ability to play 32 simultaneous channels or “voices”, there is post-processing that is required to “mix” sounds together so they can all play with the maximum 32 voice channels. The more channels your system has to mix down, the more stuttering there is, which can result in a minor to significant drop in FPS.

Realtek onboard audio is likely 32 channels.
Sound Blaster Audigy is 64 channels
Sound Blaster X-Fi is 128 channels.
Some professional audio cards (usually uber expensive) can have significantly more channels.

2 Likes
3

Screen stutter and random freezes here and there. Not too bad that it bothers me but it happens. I just assume its cause D3 servers just suck and they are not looking to change/upgrade anytime soon or at all, which sucks. Tried many and probably all known recommendations to get rid of it but nothing works. It’s funny cause all other games, including Overwatch, there is no issues, its just D3.

4

No it dont help, i try even lowest sound settings, still same, I try even different pc which hold a little bit better but still difference like from 120 to 40fps.
Dont know maybe i really have too weak pc for this 8 year old game :laughing:

5

Unless you’re playing at resolutions higher than 1080, those system specs are more than enough to play Diablo 3 even with the highest settings. I mentioned the sound channels first because I have seen that make a world of difference especially when there are a ton of sounds going on at once.

Other recommendations:
Update your graphics drivers at www.nvidia.com
Check for other updates such as motherboard chipset and audio drivers.

You can try a clean boot by running Task Manager -> Startup and disabling everything. If it makes a difference, enable half of the startup items and try again, repeat until you reproduce the problem and isolate which startup program is causing trouble.

If you have more than one antivirus program installed, remove them all and the reinstall only one of them.

If it’s been more than a year since you’ve blown the dust out of your computer, do it. Pay attention to your GPU/CPU fans and heat sinks. Also blow out the power supply. As tempting as it may be, don’t spool up the fans with high pressure air, as you could break the fins off. Use a non-conductive rod like a Bic pen or a thin dowel rod to keep the fan still.

If still no luck, maybe it’s time for a fresh installation of Windows… Don’t forget to back your data up though.

Good luck.

6

if you get a wd those frames turn all flashy and bog down hard to the point it’s annoying.

7

I’m having the same issue you do and I’ve spoke with other players that are experiencing low frame rates too.

I have a 2600x and a RX 5700.

The low frame rates occur when there is density. It doesn’t occur as often when there’s no density.

It also occurs if my teammate is having high density and I’m 4 screens away on the same map.

8

I’ve recently replaced my system, but before I did I had an i7-2600K with a GTX 970. I was able to run Diablo 3 at 1080/144 fps without any major drops in performance. Unless there has been some recent major coding screw up with Diablo 3, it’s gotta be something software wise going on, or there is a hardware problem like thermal throttling due to overheating.

9

I play with 1080.
I have 1 oficial Norton Security updated, graphic driver is updated too, i can check other drivers, not bad idea.
In Norton Security is performance manager which i sometimes run… clean pc from dust is planed already for several months :sweat_smile: But dont believe it can change something.

Yes i play with WD Mundunugu speed build… maybe its something specifically with this. I can try other characters.

Edit:
I do some more tests and it look like it doesnt matter with which class i play, if solo or in party, highest details or lowest, vertical sinc on or off… when there is a lot of things happend really fast it just killing my pc.

10

This worked for me. Playing on a beefy laptop with i9 9900k, rtx 2080, 48gb ram, GSync, and still had stuttering. Turned sound to 32, and it runs smooth in big fights now.

Thought it was thermals, thought it was particles, thought it was anything but sound. Worked for me to change channels to 32. Smooth as butter.

Thank you TheDarkJedi. Been plaguing my game for years.

2 Likes
11

once wds caused so much lag it stuttered badly to the point of omg will I live through this.

13

Yep, I just turn off sound altogether and play some music, really helps

1 Like
14

I need to dig out this topic again. How do you know about those channels? I can’t find anything about that in sound cards specs. How many channels are on Sound BlasterX AE-5 Plus and Audigy FX?

15

I’d second that. I have been working with PC hardware since mid-90s, and I can’t recall any manufacturer listing this kind of parameter in their specs. Moreover, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any other game using this kind of a setting.

Currently I have a pretty decent Focusrite Clarett which easily handles everything DAW throws at it, and it should definitely be an overkill for D3. Yet, same issue with sound as for everyone else.

16

I’m not sure why sound card manufacturers don’t list the number of simultaneous hardware channels their cards are capable of. Sure, they list 5.1 and 7.1, but not the true maximum number of simultaneous audio samples they are capable of playing.

As far as figuring it out, guess work mostly, digging through audiophile forums, basic knowledge of how older sound systems worked ,NES, C64, keyboards and sound cards with a Yamaha YM-3812 sound chip, a lot of which can be summed up in the following Youtube video:

8-Bit Guy - How Old School Sound/Music Worked

While the hardware mentioned is very old, the CPU still has to not only send the audio samples to your sound hardware to play, but if needed it must also pre-mix sound samples ahead of time to fit them all in the available channels, which can create excessive CPU overhead and stalling if there are a very large number of audio samples to mix and/or your CPU isn’t fast enough to handle the additional load.

Computers these days for the most part are powerful enough and can handle the extra overhead of mixing any audio samples together to cram them into the available hardware channels. However I believe Diablo 3s fast pace is pushing the limits with cheaper audio components like Realtek audio. The problem becomes more apparent if the other system specs aren’t fast enough to handle everything else plus that extra audio mixing overhead.

I’m not sure, but I’d guess 64 channels for both. If you have multiple monitors, bring up task manager on one and play Diablo 3 on your main. To establish a base line, start out with an in game setting of 32 channels, get into a big fight (higher greater rift) to cause a bunch of audio sounds to play.
Crank it up to 64, repeat… 128, repeat, and so on until you start seeing noticeable spikes in CPU usage and drops in FPS in big fights.

One thing worth mentioning is that one single channel only applies to one speaker. A stereo audio sample would use two hardware channels.

17

How serious of a fight are you talking about? When I go to kadala to gamble, I am very serious about fighting her.

18

Sound wasn’t the cause of my FPS drops, it was the game engine focusing on one core at 100%.

  1. Try pressing ctrl+alt+del to bring up task manager, right click your DiabloIIIx64.exe and set affinity to only a few even number CPU cores that are not 0. I choose 2,4,6 and find that 3 cores yields the best stability for me.
  2. Try changing the Hardware Class setting from 4 to 1 in your D3prefs file located in your PC documents folder. This reduces the amount of graphic resources but dramatically increases FPS.

I hope this helps! Cheers :beers:

19

Well, the issue seems to have been fixed in the latest update. Apart from some micro-stutters, I don’t see any problems running with CoE and 128 channels.
My D3Debug is not flooded with some bogus messages though, but I can live with that :slight_smile:.