OKAY.
I have spent the last hour working with my Nephew remotely to address his graphic card issues:
He is running an AMD CPU with an EVGA 3080.
Now, he was seeing 80+ degrees on the GPU, but getting hard lock crashes that forced a power shutdown or reset of the PC to get back to working. Card didn’t seem to be hot, but crashing hard.
So.
We sat down and went over his system and settings:
- He runs 3 monitors, one of which is a 1440p 165hz screen. All 3 are connected to the GPU.
- We went over the Nvidia panel. Graphics driver was up to date as of this post. We set a cap of 170 in the graphic driver. G-Sync was enabled for desktop and fullscreen.
- Went to Documents\Diablo IV. Renamed the LocalPrefs file.
- Opened Diablo IV.
- Went directly to settings after going through initial setup (because we reset that file)
- Defaults assigned the game to Ultra.
- We capped the refresh here to 170 as well. Vsync was left On.
- Turned off DLSS.
- Turned off Reflex.
- Turned off Peripheral Lighting.
- Scaling was set to 100%.
Went in game and tested. Results:
FPS was hitting 165 briefly, but bounced all over from 130-150. We tried lowering it to 120. Helped a bit, but temps were hitting mid 80s, but memory temps hit 92C!
Opening inventory caused a brief stutter and delay with FPS being dropped as low as 50.
Backed out and changed settings:
Lowered graphics to High.
Ran the game again:
FPS was 120 most of the time, but still seeing very high temps when at vendor or inventory, as well as hard hits to the FPS when opening inventory. But was better.
Exited and made more adjustments:
Ran MSI Afterburner.
Set a custom fan curve to help lower temperature of memory.
Lowered power limit to 95%.
Change game settings for FPS to 100.
Ran game again:
Temps now staying between 50-65C for the GPU. Memory temps hitting around 80C, but only when at vendor or in inventory.
Game play is now smooth and seems to play nicely. Overall, the adjustments helped a ton for his 1440P setup.
Some thoughts here:
He is going to try using just one monitor to see what that does to the overall load vs 3.
He is going to dust check the system and blow out any dust to ensure its cooling as well as it should be.
But so far, it seems to be better. We think it was locking up due to running too hot. Not on the GPU but the GPU memory potentially.
Please note, one thing I have been seeing in common with the inventory/vendor thing, is the memory gets taxed the most.
UPDATE:
He checked his dust level. It was at level YIKES. (he has pets)
So, yeah. Check your fans and vents and heat sinks. lol