Setting Affinity - No More Stutter

Technical Support
1

How to fix the annoying intermittent in game pauses:

  1. Launch Diablo3
  2. CTRL+ALT+DEL
  3. Open Task Manager
  4. Right Click on “Diablo III Retail” and click “Go to Details”
  5. Right Click on “Diablo III64.exe” and click “Set affinity”
  6. Select CPU 0 and CPU 1 only and click ok
  7. Close Task manager

I stumbled across this yesterday and can confirm that it resolved my game stutter/freezing issue after playing for several hours today.

Anyone else can corroborate this fix?

Can Blizzard comment why selecting only certain cores of the CPU would relieve us from the annoying intermittent stutter we see?

Thanks

2

Not Blizzard, but…

Most likely either your hardware or OS is having some difficulty with resource management so when you tell the machine to use one core, specifically, for a given process it frees that up from the pool and stops trying to “randomly” apply other threads and processes to it, making it potentially faster and more stable.

There are drawbacks to doing it too, regarding load balancing, and could in theory melt you.

1 Like
3

Elaborate on “melt you”? Certainly not meaning melting the CPU. :slight_smile: :rofl: My CPU is a 12th gen I9-12900KF. I also am running DDR5 ram on a high end Asus mobo with a Asus RTX 3090 OC.

4

There is more to it than your processor and RAM.

And no, I will not further elaborate. You’re smart enough to yell out partial specs… so you’re smart enough to internet search what CPU/processor affinity means and does.

5

Then there is something else wrong with your system. Probably driver or software related. I have a similar system (12700kf, 32GB DDR4, RTX 3090) and have no issues with stutter or freezing in game.

6

Do you have Nvidia Control Panel. If so, do you have specific G-Sync setting in that control panel or just have that set to default.

7

I just have it set to whatever defaults the driver started with, other than activating Gsync.

8

Is your monitor able to do HDR? What resolution are you running in D3? My display is an 27” ASUS Rog Strix XG27UQ with max refresh of 144 Hz. I’m running D3 at 3840x2160x119fps.

9

I’m running at 1440p at my monitor’s max refresh rate of 165Hz. Uncapped, D3’s framerate is something ridiculous like 200+fps.

10

Heh. I wish the affinity trick helped. Up until the latest update I was able to play butter smooth in Windows 10. Now if I have the FPS limiter set to anything (above 50 FPS), the game runs at exactly 50 FPS. If I turn off the limiter I get my 60 FPS back, but have constant microstutter. It’s like Blizzard somehow gave us a PAL version of the game instead of the NA version. That’s the only thing that makes any sense given the FPS limiter causes the game to run at default PAL refresh rates.

11

If you have an Nvidia card, you can limit framerates in the driver rather than the app. It may help get rid of the micro-stutters. Odd thing is, I remember when I had a 60Hz monitor that it would, on occasion, get these stutters (and sometimes run @ only 30fps). All of that cleared up once I got a Gsync monitor. So if you are planning on upgrading your monitor, you can try a variable refresh rate monitor.

12

I’ll be upgrading to a Samsung QN85A TV (or its successor if it has the right pixel layout and panel type). Has G-Sync built in. Would kill for a good affordable true 4k60 GPU, but sadly, chip shortage + scalper yay.

But all that aside, something in the latest client update borked things badly. I am now also among those that have the grey screen briefly before login with the “unable to initiate D3D” error. Seems like auto-detection was broken. Might have to nuke my prefs and try again and see if it helps. I doubt it though. :frowning:

13

Try switching from Full Screen to Borderless Windowed mode. That might help.

14

Didn’t help. And it made performance worse. Whatever they changed with regard to hardware detection broke for a lot of people in this patch.

Edit: I’m getting what appears to be mostly normal behaviour now with the nVidia control panel set to limit FPS to 60 manually with vSync set to Adaptive (with vSync turned on in-game as screen tearing happens if the in-game toggle is set to off even if the nVidia control panel’s vSync is active). FPS remained at 50 exactly until I did the final step of turning off the in-game FPS limiter. So the FPS limiter is indeed broken in this patch and/or is mistakenly set to PAL refresh rates.

15

Unfortunately, I have not had much luck getting this game to run smooth on 60Hz. Maybe some people have. Using this monitor puts you in a bind on this game imho. If you use v-sync, you deal with the stutters. If you turn it off, there is nasty screen tearing.
Having a 144Hz monitor will greatly help in this game. It will allow you to not use the v-sync while keeping the screen tearing hardly noticable.

I use a 144Hz monitor and what I do is cap framerate in Nvidia Control Panel to 144 fps. Uncheck max foreground and max background fps limiters in game. Don’t use Vertical Sync. I use fullscreen as well. At 144Hz you should barely see screen tearing. The game runs very smooth for me.

I recommend setting everything back to default and getting a new monitor sadly :expressionless: This should also improve your experience with any game(being that its not a console port).