It’s been a bit and thought I would check in.
Seeing huge streamers lose entire characters (in hardcore) due to this performance problem made me confirm I am not playing the game anymore until this is addressed.
Workarounds via losing all audio is kinda ridiculous tbh.
Has there been any fixes or has there been any official posts on the issue yet?
it’s funny how these issues keep coming up. The framerate/lag problem in higher grs… i think 110 and above where mob count is higher is where i’m seeing the lag. a few years/seasons ago, AOE was blamed by players as the issue, demanding that support characters turn off their AOE…which of course, did not fix the issue. Blizzard staff, either a blue posted or in a diablo youtube video said it is NOT AoE, It was a technical issue about how memory was being read and they are “working on it”. Actually, I think they fixed it because the problem did go away. However, Blizzard suffers from a long standing problem: when they make a patch to fix something (sever side so we don’t know), they copy and paste old code and undo their previous fixes of other issues. It’s why we periodically see old issues resurface. I guess it’s too complicated to not use old code with bugs because no one will label the file as “CRAP” . So when they try to fix the framerate/lag issue, be prepared for something else to be re-broken.
Still have intermittent 10 second freezing with all sound disabled. Tried setting sound to (16). Tried setting it to mono.
Feel sad. Guess the best thing to do is just try not to let it bother you?
Maybe it’ll get fixed. Maybe it never will 
Nope.
And not everybody has that issue.
My audio works fine, and I don’t get random freezes. I’m running W 10 20H2; pretty standard intel/nvidia setup. Not sure why my system is fine but others are having so many issues.
Not everyone has this problem but it looks like most players do. Based on the forums it looks like its not fixed yet.
If you are playing firebird-wizard, remove ALL area damage. Both from gear and paragons.
Try this please, it worked for me. Have not had the freeze issue since.
I think it has to do with the audio hardware on certain motherboards, and/or the corresponding drivers that those need being compatible with the FMOD file D3 uses?
I’m also lucky to not have the issue on my PCs.
I am trying this out – “install driver only.” Installed AMD 21.4.1 (latest) for RX580. So far no freezing with wizard. I have 2014 pc (z97, i7-4790k, DDR3 16gb, RX580, SSD). Also, set Win10 power settings to no sleep, no hibernate. D3 video options vsync enabled, low fx enabled, others at low/off. D3 sound options enabled and set to “1,” 16, stereo. Realtek driver not installed.
It makes no difference what your specs are. I have never run into a person that doesn’t have this issue on PC yet.
I don’t have it. I did for a short period last patch until they fixed it. There are several versions and several causes. It’s mostly because they’re pushing the game beyond what the servers your system or the internet are capable of handling smoothly. As such it will never be fixed entirely.
Same here.
More like some players, not most players.
There are several in this thread. Including me.
There are some similarities in the problems. I for example don’t have any issue with the system freezing. That said, if I crank the audio up to 128 channels, and turn on the in game music, I get micro-stutter, but no freezes.
I normally have the in-game music disabled and run 64 channels. I also force the game to run at 60FPS, as I don’t need it running at 144 unlike OW.
Now, some have fixed it by changing sound settings. Others have helped by changing graphic settings. Still others have fixed it changing CPU Affinity settings.
I have a dual core pseudo quad core Gen 7 i3 7100 on this system. So the affinity change probably would do nothing for my setup, but those of you with 4 or more physical cores might need to look at changing your CPU affinity settings. D3 was never really coded for multi-core CPUs beyond 4 threads (threads not cores). 2 is recommended at most. Some of you have been setting the affinity to Processor 0 & 1 only. Keep in mind I’m referring to when they upgraded the engine to the 64 bit version, not when it was 32 bit. As a side note, has anyone tried playing the game with the 32 bit version of the engine to see if that helped? lol
I run an MSI ITX Build and it has an MSI brand GTX 1660 card with nVidia settings configured towards performance in most settings.
Another potential is the hardware version of the on-board audio chip as well as the version of the driver installed. I don’t think the version of Windows 10 is a direct cause either, as I run the latest version of 10 myself.
But I have been following these various threads trying to find a common cause. I think there are multiple factors that any combination of some causes problems.
A lot of it probably has to do with modern CPU design and changes in drivers/OS combined with newer graphic cards.
Anyway.
I would drop the music (disable it) and change your channels to 32 or 64 in stereo and set the sound device to the specific output, not “default”.
Then set your CPU affinity for the game. This is done from the task manager, right-click the game while its running and choose “go to details”. Here right-click and choose “affinity” Each CPU is different, but CPU0 is always going to be a physical core. You can try selecting only CPU0 and CPU1 then hit “Ok”.
But you need to do this each time you launch the game. There are ways to code a special shortcut for the system to start the game with the affinity already set, but that can be tricky to setup correctly and you have to login from the game menu into your account every time.
Chances are, those suggestions might help. I will have to experiment further with a system that has more than 4 cores before I can definitively know for sure. lol
It’s not every player. I have yet to experience it.
I only freeze when playing with firebirds. Too many calculations with the ignite dot.
The problem is that you are directly using workarounds that place limits on options that used to be fine to use in years past.
I’m not using any workarounds. I have sound maxed at 128 channels, 5.1 channel audio; 2560x1440x144 resolution, all graphic options maxed. No messing around with cpu affinity or other things.
I never claimed otherwise.
Do you want to play the game and not have it freeze even if it is limiting in some fashion? Because who knows how long before a true fix comes along.
Just trying to help here, don’t be busting my chops over it. I don’t have this issue, others do.
I don’t have to care about it at all or help or anything. But at least I’m trying.
Yeah. Exactly. Years past. Years before even Windows 8 existed. Years past when Windows 7 was top of the OS hill and XP was still supported.
Years before the CPUs started coming out with more than 4 thread capable for more people to afford. Years before graphic cards started having hundreds of thread capable processors. Years before the Devs started adding more and more stuff to the game, bit by bit.
You come up with a better idea then.
Not everyone is. My system needs no work arounds. It’s pretty new but far from GG. My 2009 built i7 920 didn’t have the freezing issues and my old 2010 HP laptop with i5-480M and Radeon 5650 1GB vRAM, 8gb system RAM runs it only at like 30 fps but no multi second freezing like some have with fat superior hardware.
All three of those computers ran at reasonable settings for the hardware (the new one everything maxed) and no changing of fmod files or changing audio settings and do not have the freezing issue.
It did seem like one version of Win10 killed my FPS since it seemed to cause a bug with the in game D3 FPS limiting settings, but that’s a different issue, and it was still not freezing, just capped the overall FPS lower than it was set for.
They’re seems to be some interaction between certain hardware and software on certain motherboard setups that isn’t as obvious as the overall specifications and it sucks that it’s been effecting people for several years at this point, but it’s not everyone.
If it is an issue with the onboard sound, then what about using a USB external sound “card?” You can get them really cheap off Amazon. Shouldn’t they solve the issue?