I think we all need to take down the attacks on each other about what the right thought here is.
I get it. No one wants to have their card break. And its very easy to blame anything but yourself when it goes wrong. And you may be right to blame something else in some cases.
But here’s the thing.
Millions of PC gamers out there right?
So millions of custom and pre-built gaming PCs, right?
And millions of different configurations, setups, and philosophies about how to build and maintain those systems, right?
So its not outside the realm of common sense, that maybe, just maybe, some of these issues that some of you are having, might have nothing to do at all with the game, but have to do with something going on with the hardware.
As a point to the fact, I know of several posts on this very forum, when people found out they had a bad PSU, or not correctly cable connected the card to the PSU, or it was full of pet hair and dirt. Those weren’t caused by Blizzard were they?
With regards to Blizzard and Diablo IV. This is my stance at the moment with how much of the forum and all the different posts I have been reading for the past week:
The game clearly has issues, and on two fronts:
1: VRAM usage. There is a clear problem here, with not only using a lot of the VRAM if not all of it, but not handling the transfer into and out of it smoothly for everyone. All systems show the same amount of abuse (full VRAM, hot memory chips on the GPU) but not every system is reacting the same. In fact a small amount (over the whole picture) are actually having issues. But that translates into several hundred of you at least.
Blizzard needs to address the optimization of how assets are being handled and/or find out why some systems are choking up when VRAM is maxed out and people get errors, crashes, etc.
2: Network connectivity. There is also a clear issue here. Network traffic for Diablo IV from what I have been able to observe (and I have been collecting data all over the forum for the past few days) is that many ISPs are blocking part of the traffic while playing the game. Now, not all of them are. But some are. Comcast comes up a LOT.
But that’s not all. We are also seeing issues with the network traffic messing up home routers and modems. So again, something with their traffic and how it works is apparently triggering both local hardware and potentially some ISPs to block or interfere with the game connection.
Those two things lead to people having a poor experience playing the game. Not only that, the way the game plays is causing undue stress on the GPU hardware, regardless if it can handle it, supposed to handle it, or not. Fact is, its causing problems. I will say its not going to directly ruin your card, unless you let it.
If you go in and want to run the game at max settings knowing its a risk to your card at this point in the game’s release time, that’s kinda on you. The rest of us are knowingly taking the time to ensure our hardware is not going to get overtaxed rather than have a 1000+ dollar hardware get damaged due to our neglect or trust that a video game won’t cause it to run too hard and potentially fail.
That said, we can’t solely blame Blizzard for this alone. The cards are supposed to have safeties that kick in to protect them. And in some cases, I think they are, but are being overlooked because of how they perform and look like something else is wrong instead.
If a card overheats or has a power issue, the card may:
- Slow down (throttle) and cause the FPS to drop along with game performance in general.
- Black screen and kick fans to full.
- Kick the computer off completely.
These symptoms are the GPU, PSU and Motherboard taking action to prevent damage to the hardware. At this point, something is wrong causing an issue.
However the first issue is also happening with the VRAM issue. But that could in turn be due to the memory temperature getting too hot and the card still throttling for all I know.
There are SO many variables here.
But yes, Blizzard needs to address some issues that is on their plate that I described above.
As for all of us, we need to be more civil to each other. All this does is make everyone angry and combative. That won’t help fix the problems.
Game on.
