Excessive GPU memory usage on diablo 4

Technical Support
1

I have a ryzen 5 5600x and a rtx 3070 (8gb of vram) with 32gbs of system memory (ram). All of my hardware is up to date including drivers.

To begin, this game sucks in terms of optimization, i never would expect the ’ low ’ preset with a LOCKED frame rate of only 144 fps on 1080p, struggling to perform smoothly. I have no issues on any other games, and push well over 300fps+ on esports titles. And no my computer is not overheating, my cpu doesnt go past 70c and gpu tops out at 70c once the memory leaks start.

What i’ve noticed that seems to end up causing a lot of stutters is what i believe to be a GPU memory leak. Don’t believe me? Open up task manager, and check your GPU memory usage - checked? Now load up diablo, and see what it is. Then try playing for a hour or two, you should see your GPU usage now be near its max capacity, and the funniest part is if you change and apply ANY of your graphics settings, you will suddenly see around a 2gb vram drop… This game is also the ONLY game that i experience strong lag when trying to multi task (ex, just finished dungeon i wanna click on discord to type to a mate) oh now theres a 1/5 chance when i do that on ONLY this game, it will lag for a few seconds effectively freezing my system.

Another thing that infuriates me about this game is most people reading this would say ’ well duh lower your frames ’ first of all, im on the lowest preset with all graphics on lowest, so that shouldn’t be a need. And if i TRY to raise the graphics settings, it doesn’t change anything. It’s almost like no matter what preset you use the game is coded to just use all of your vram and hope for the best. When i would try switching between 60 or 144 fps, i noticed no difference in additional gpu/cpu usage, and the memory would start off lower at 60 fps, but the memory leak would actually start much faster often on 60 fps vs 144 fps…

I’ve basically given up at this point and am gonna wait for the developers to fix there game. I’ve been experimenting long enough.

3 Likes
2

Well this has been pretty well explored now.

I was making extensive tests for several days starting this past weekend.

One thing I am certain of. VRAM use in D4 is not optimized. I don’t consider it a leak so much as an issue with handling assets. But here’s the thing:

I’m running a 12900k, on a Z790 board, with 32GB of DDR5, Kingston Fury Renegade 1TB NVME. I’m using an RTX 3070Ti. (also 8MB) and have a 1200W PSU.

This is coupled to a G-Sync Acer Predator 24" HD monitor at 144FPS and I run a cap in game of 150, but it runs at 144FPS as expected.
I use High settings (at defaults), Reflex is off, Peripheral Lighting is off. V-Sync is on, scaling at 100%.

Game plays butter smooth. Even once the VRAM maxes out and is bouncing at the limit for hours.

I have also setup custom fan curves for every fan (and CPU AIO Pump) in the system, including the PSU fan. Using Afterburner to run a custom curve for the video card.

GPU runs at peak, 55c, 68c, 72c (GPU, Hotspot, VRAM)

And it will run this way for hours.

And to make sure I wasn’t missing something, I also tried running a 4K 46" Samsung TV at 60FPS for a couple hours, no problem. I even turned off the Windows Swap File (disabled it). No issues. No crashes, no nothing.

I can’t even seem to make it crash. Doesn’t matter if my Bnet is running or not, if my antivirus is running or not, even if browser hardware acceleration is on or off, nadda.

So I keep trying to help some of you on here, in the hopes to get those of you trying to get the game to play well too.

But alas, I seem to not make that happen. And I don’t know why some systems, even ones that seem similar to my own, are still running like poop, or having VRAM issues, or running of of memory, crashing, freezing, etc.

I have to think there might be some hardware problems SOME of the time at play here, but no one wants to be told they might have a problem, and I get that.

My nephew thought his hardware was fine, till he pulled the cover and found it full of pet hair and dust. But that’s an extreme case. lol

Anyway.

I don’t have the answers much more at this point. If I had my hands on one of these that was having issues and could work my troubleshooting methods, maybe I could come up with a why.

Game on.

2 Likes
3

I think VRAM issues surface as big stalls. The game seems to immediately reserve a block of memory and manage what is in there itself.

The current implementation seems to require 16GB of VRAM to use ultra texture quality without issues.

What I found improved stutters for me was disabling gsync and running monitor at a refresh rate that I could maintain framerate at.

The forums won’t let me post the link, but the “diablo-iv-benchmark-test” article on the german Computerbase webpage has a performance analysis where they found on Nvidia GPUs there being frametime spikes every few seconds (will appear as a stutter). This agrees with what I’ve been seeing with gsync enabled. A framerate monitor will still show a locked framerate for me as the frametime spikes are instantaneous (for a single frame) and doesn’t drop the average framerate enough to see the measurement drop, but visually is very apparent.

4

Hey there, Your on Intel im on ryzen, it’s truly hard to tell if maybe it’s even as far as an AMD specific issue as well. You are certainly right though, for all i know me and many others could have issues, but when it ONLY happens on this game, and i play pc games on a daily basis, it’s easy for me to assume it’s out of my control.

5

I have a 4090 and it uses around 19-22GB, I mean sure use whatever is available but I dont think I am getting the performance returns as the game still has asset load stutter and long load times considering the game is on a WD SN850X.

6

I’m on a 3080 Ti, Ryzen 9 5950x 32 ddr4 3600 ram and I had to put this game on high textures cause it’s impossible to play on ultra textures, 4k 120hz monitor, never had any issue in any other game before. The graphics are not even impressive…

7

the way this game is, you could have 8tb of vram, it will find a way to use it all. It’s funny to me to that the devs also refuse to acknowledge this issue as from day one i’ve seen countless people complaining about it while I also was encountering it, but it’s been getting even worse these last few days.

1 Like
8

I use a 4k TV. I’m running a 12GB 4070 ti. I can watch my GPU memory useage in task manager go up as I play. Once it gets to 11.1 the game starts studdering, making it unplayable. After that happens I switch to medium graphics and the GPU memory drops back down. Once that gets to 11.1 I switch back to high settings. Love the game just wish I didn’t have to do this.

9

Update to anyone having this issue:

i decided to go above and beyond since the post, and along with the previous troubleshooting steps I did i decided to disable hardware acceleration on all programs that use it, and updated every possible driver/bios under the Sun. Then turned on nvidia resizeable bar, (wasnt on by default due to the type of GPU i have not initally supporting it on launch.) and that has seemed to solve a lot of t he lag i have, still occasional stutters but it’s been much better

A bit of a shame that the game is so poorly optimized i have to use settings i’ve never used on any other games to have a rather smooth experience finally, but it is what it is. Maybe even some stealh hotfixes by the devs relating to matters like this.

10

Yeah, but not sure it matters that much.

I actually quickly built an AMD based rig last night out of some spare parts:

AMD Ryzen 5 3800G
32GB DDR4
512GB Samsung NVME
Gigabyte Motherboard
850W PSU
Asus 2070
Windows 11

I forced the game to play on the default loaded Windows 11 Nvidia drivers (Version 456.71) which is below game requirement. (it complained, but I used the GPU bypass command).
Ran the game at Ultra settings for over an hour, while VRAM was maxed out.

Other than the game was visibly struggling to deal with the Ultra settings on that system, it didn’t crash, freeze, lockup, give errors, over heat, nothing. It was certainly struggling to play at Ultra, but beyond that, it was consistent.

At peak, it had used 99.9% of VRAM, had used a bit over 15GB of system memory total, and never hit thermal limits on CPU or GPU. In fact it stayed below 180F on the GPU and this was in a case with basic cooling (stock AMD cooler, and 2 case fans, one front, one rear)

I will continue to test this build and see if I can force it to start screwing up, so that I can then try to fix it.

I don’t know what else to do. lol

11

Thanks a lot, I came here to figure out why character/vendor portraits specifically were driving my GPU fans crazy – looks like it was largely due to Peripheral Lighting. (Or maybe NVidia Reflex, but I strongly suspect the former.) This did the trick. The game runs perfectly fine at all times, but any time I open my inventory or a vendor, my PC would prepare for takeoff. I tried adjusting the various sliders forever and didn’t even think to try disabling Peripheral Lighting.

FWIW My specs are Intel 10700K, 32GB RAM, 3070 GPU on a 1440p60 monitor (as such, I am not using the “Ultra” texture pack.) Everything else is maxed out with DLSS on “Quality” setting. RAM & VRAM are constantly maxed out while CPU cores have a little headroom. Temperatures are fine (CPU 50-60C during times of load, GPU would approach 60C with character portraits on screen before disabling Peripheral Lighting – now it just hovers in the low 40s at all times.)

12

I just made a post as well. You can see my stats on my post. I’m so annoyed that I dealt with it for this long. I thought it was lag until I started looking into it.

13

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.