Trying to locate common factors in the freezing

That is what I keep hearing yes. haha

Some have had good results, some have not. I may do a followup query on things tried and whether something worked or not.

Don’t forget to fill out those two Silver if you haven’t yet. I"m assuming you haven’t because no one has checked off RX500 series cards yet. :stuck_out_tongue:

Still, it is confusing. I use Focusrite Clarett USB, but there are probably still people out there who have discrete sound cards installed into motherboards’ PCI slots. Especially on older (10+ years) systems.

Another thing, the SC / HC option. There is no “Both” choice.

That is technically its own soundcard device, so its an add on, and not everyone is going to have a 500-900 dollar sound card like that.

Actually I would argue that nearly all computer systems sold in the past 20 years all had onboard sound. Very few motherboards since the early Pentium 1 and 2 days had the sound cards as optional. I have been building and working on systems for nearly 30 years. While they still make installable PCIe (and still some PCI) cards, they are very few brands and models these days compared to 20 years ago. Any sound device that is not already built into the board is considered an add-on, hence the option.

Good point. I was looking for whatever a person plays the most, but yeah, I could have had that option as well. Though its not something that probably matters when looking at it from hindsight. Still, thanks.

Just fyi, I used that replace the fmod file or whatever to fix my issue, though my computer will completely crash after a while. The game still runs perfectly fine, but everything else hangs and I have to hard shut off my computer.

That doesn’t sound like a good fix then. Ugh.

Given it could be my computer. Maybe I need to OC my CPU, which makes no sense given the circumstances, but it DOES take like 4-5 hours before anything like that happens.

Aight, so I did the survey. I do appreciate your investment into this and hope you find some results. And I also hope Blizzard can follow up about this as well if you decide to try to pursue them with your info.

Anyhow…Device Manager: NVIDIA High Definition Audio; NVIDIA Virtual Audio Device (Wave Extensible) (WDM); Realtek High Definition Audio (Disabled)

In game, it shows NVIDIA High Definition Audio being used. While it’s always suggested that on-board Realtek audio has been the culprit, while mine is disabled as of a few days ago.

I’ve also recently tried a fix solution I found that recommends changing the Set Affinity to only enable CPU 0+1, and disable 3+4. So I’ve tried that (As of today)

Either way, D3 seems to feel smoother overall. But I still receive crash / bug reports window (sometimes), but this could as well be a different issue altogether (Game crash / freezes up, with windows cursor in game, when alt-tab to windows, D3 isnt on taskbar and cant alt-tab back to it, D3 is still open in task manager (Dead Lock), have to end task, windows is still in my D3 resolution as well until I end task)…

I haven’t run many 4man groups (Where I seem to experience the 10sec lag/freeze the most) here lately. Guess I’ll need to put this to more of a test in 4man groups to see if this is cleared up any.

Edit: I have all in-game graphics set to lowest setting, and sound channels are on lowest setting as well. (Since forever)

No argument here. The question is, whether people use them. Back in the day, when the only integrated option was AC97 (or worse), I had several PCI soundcards, eventually settling on Auzentech Prelude 7.1. Now, that was THE sound…
But I digress, nowadays people won’t bother with anything like that. Especially since the (essentially) only surviving PCI-E soundcard is either ASUS Xonar, which has its own issues, or exotique stuff like RME, whose prices I’m not exactly comfortable discussing here.

Your survey got me thinking, and yesterday I went into the BIOS and disabled the built-in audio completely. I don’t think it will make any difference, but still, shouldn’t hurt. Will need to give it a run and see.

Doesn’t sound like a bad thing to try though, let us know.

That’s interesting. Maybe the sound card is not the actual cause then. I like coming across nuggets of info like this.

Let me know if any of that helped.

As an update, I’m nearly up to 20 responses, so keep them coming everyone, no matter if you have the freezing/sound issue or not.

The only time the game really Freezes on me. Is just when I get into a new game. Other than that it really doesn’t freeze on me when playing the game. But when it does freeze it freezes the computer. I have to do a hard restart sometimes.

These are the main problems that I’ve noticed:

1: Hard game freeze when starting a game or joining a game. Solo or multiplayer. Must kill Diablo3 through task manager. Seems to happen more often when entering a game starting in Act 2 Hidden Camp. I’ve seen this issue happen several times in a row. The issue comes and goes I’ve seen this issue for several years.

2: Hard game freeze upon entering a rift or a greater rift. Solo or multiplayer. Must kill Diablo3 through task manager. I haven’t seen this often enough to recognize which map set(s) it happens on, or if that even matters. Very erratic on frequency, can happen a few times in one night, or not at all over the course of a month. This is a development within the past couple of years.

3: Random 10-15 second freezes while playing. Solo or multiplayer. Happens mostly in higher greater rifts, but I’ve seen it happen elsewhere. If playing solo, the game automatically goes into a pause state. This is a development in the past couple of years.

4: Stuttering issues playing certain classes or with certain classes. (Wizard) This is a more recent problem.

5: Error when jumping into a friends game. I don’t recall the error number right now, but you have to wait for the error to pop up, then you can join afterwards.

1 and 2 I’ve experienced with my current system and an older system. I don’t think 3, 4 and 5 were present or I didn’t notice them until after I upgraded to my current rig in 2019.

Current rig:
ASRock x570 Extreme4 (Realtek audio)
Ryzen 9 3900X
GTX 1080 Ti
16GB DDR4-3600
1TB gen4 NVMe SSD

Old rig:
ASUS P8Z68 Deluxe (gen1, Realtek audio)
i7-2600K
GTX 970
16GB DDR3-1866
SATA SSD

After disabling Realtek audio in BIOS, went through several 100+ GRs today, then made a full bounty run, then another couple of GRs; all of this was solo. All GRs were made with CoE equipped and AD from paragon on. No lags or freezes of any kind, but I suppose I might just been lucky.

I also use MM:Conflagrate and Slow Time: Point Of No Return instead of the standard setup; not sure if this has anything to do with it. Further testing required.

This is a separate audio chip built into the graphics card, which sends the audio via HDMI / DP cable (I suppose you use speakers in your monitor, right?). It doesn’t use Realtek or any other audio chip, it’s completely self-sufficient. Still, I suspect that disabling Realtek in Windows might not be enough, as the device is still present and game might trigger on it when it sees it. If you will disable built-in audio in motherboard’s BIOS, it will disappear completely.
(No idea if it will help; just food for thought.)

When you have freezes be sure your getting the sound error, which will be in the D3error log. You could be getting HD or SSD issues which can cause lags and freezes during loads. There is fixes out there for that. The sound freeze on the other hand has no fix so far, just a bandaid.

Aight, I appreciate that…I’ll try it out, eventually.

Those of you that have been filling out the surveys, thank you! I have had a couple people that didn’t fill out the second one though. Be sure to do both of them when you do them.

I’m almost up to 20 responses. Once we are 7 days in I will be gathering the responses and posting them up here. But the more I get before then, the better. Whether you are encountering freezes or not freezing at all, please take a couple minutes to fill these out.

You all have till Tuesday this week (the 4th) of May:

Just be sure to fill out both, they are very short and won’t take long. Any problems, just reply to this thread.

Thanks,

An interesting lead has been posted in another thread on this forum:

Since all we can do at this point is grasping at straws, this one might also be worth checking. Since it specifically mentiions “spatial sound”, check your sound settings and make sure it’s off:
https://imgur.com/pkIlCsB

Thanks for the update. I think mine is off in my settings, going to go check that.

Yeah, my spatial setting is disabled. I also noted that I have no enhancements set, and “immediate mode” is checked.

Default format is also set to 24 bit/48khz studio quality. Both exclusive options are checked.

I’m only sharing this as mine works fine. And its a Realtek as well of course. Gen 6/7 Intel B250i chipset based motherboard.

Driver version is 6.0.1.8105 using codec ALC887

So what happen with this thread and results? Find any common factors in your surveys?

Done plus 20 characters.

Excellent question. Lame excuse, been working a lot lately. But I do need to finish this up yes. Thanks for the reminder!

I have an update for this thread finally:

Here are the basic results of the surveys:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/results/SM-T9FH5X2D9/

https://www.surveymonkey.com/results/SM-6TRBKN2D9/

Thanks to everyone that helped out!