I get to play for any where between 5mins to 30mins before my screens go black and my gpu fans start running at max speed and I have to hard restart computer. I have tried resetting the graphics settings and turning them down all with no success. This started day 1 of season 3, I was able to play from beta up till now without this ever being an issue and only happens while playing D4.
i7-8700K @ 3.7 32G RAM NVidia RTX 2080 8gb
After all that is done, plug it back in and try again. As I said, these are the basics, but they help.
Already cleaned it, temps hadn’t and still don’t show or report over heating or temps that are out of range. The game also worked the days prior to the season 3 patch. Also there are many games more taxing than this that will cause my computer to struggle and max out all available resources and still don’t ever crash my computer.
Well, the symptoms say otherwise.
The game by itself is not going to trigger the card into fail safe mode. It is going black screen and full fans as a protection response to prevent damage.
And the temps that matter with D4 are Memory temps. Most cards don’t monitor this. However the hotspot is the next closest one.
I would still do all the other things I listed. Check cables, check card seat, all of it. Monitor power usage.
I have a tool called GPU-Z and it can monitor in real time with a graph your power usage. Diablo IV can cause some harsh power spikes sometimes and if a PSU isn’t responding fast enough to the demand, or has a weak link between it and the power hungry card, it may trigger a crash.
So then what changed from the 22 to the 23rd? The game ran fine for hours with no issues until after the patch. I have also seen a slew of others with the exact same issue and no resolution posted. I have also read your similar recommendations on others with the same issue. Unfortunately is doesn’t appear to be the solution. Seems like it has more to do with either a NVidia-Diablo driver compatibility or a specific feature of Diablo that causes an issue with run away VRAM. The issue never happens immediately, nor is it under a certain circumstance. it can happen while under heavy load, or it can happen while isolated in an empty area with little to no demand. Also if it was related to any of those, I would be having issues else where, not just with Diablo, and I am not. It also appears to happen more frequently the lower I run the settings.
Well, that’s interesting.
Maybe the card is throttling due to not having enough demand…
There is a setting for this, in the nvidia control panel.
Power Management Mode. Try setting this to maximum performance. Then put your graphics back to where you normally run them.
I currently have a 3070 Ti, coupled to a 12900k on 32GB of DDR5, with a high speed NVME.
Now, I’m not running my power management at that setting, but I am running the game at 1440p at full ultra with the high res packs, at 100FPS without any FPS dips, no stutter, no lag, nothing, and average temps in the low to mid 60c’s on the hotspot, and lower on the GPU. It may be that the load is heavy enough that it doesn’t have an issue, but if you have a higher card than I do, it may actually be having this weird problem of shutting itself down and leading to a crash.
There were instances of this with some other games before, and a few reports on the forums, but not enough to worry about.
But its something to try.
I will be picking up a 4080 Super next week. Going to see if my luck changes then.
I hate linking this, but it has all my current game settings. And yes, they haven’t changed from when this post was done:
-Full breakdown of a system that plays Diablo IV without problems:
Turns out this issue is way larger than D4 and first signs of the card dying (granted everything else checks out and its not related to the PSU or MB dying) read 1 comment that someone believes it’s due to the cards weight and average running temps, causing the PCI slot to slowly be pulled away from board or the power supply sockets on the card separating from the card itself causing voltage issues. Read most people where able to buy some play time (going from every 5-30min to 2-3hrs) by redoing all the pads and thermal paste and tweaking down the power settings on the card but ultimately the card would continue to have the issue under load until replaced.
Prior to this I played D4 great on i7@ 3.7g RTX 2080 8g, 32g Ram, and a 1TB Sata.
Also found out the VRAM issue seems to be by design but Blizzard doesn’t want to talk about it or I haven’t seen them address it. 
Apparently D4 sets aside a percentage of available VRAM and uses it as it pleases for the game. Which looks crazy, in charts, go form almost no usage to like 85-90% usage just by starting the game.
I really don’t see the problem here. The problem that some have seem to run into, especially back near launch, was the game would consume it all, leave no headroom and start causing performance issues.
I have monitored mine since launch, and yes, at launch I could see the signs of the same issues others were having, but for whatever reason, my system wasn’t choking on it.
It would sit there with the VRAM maxed out and play fine. It was odd perhaps, but it didn’t appear to hurt anything.
Now, as I posted in that thread I linked, I had taken steps to set custom fan curves and setup the system to have better thermal control on the card, which I believe helped a lot.
But I spent months monitoring both my system and the forum threads about the various issues.
Ultimately, I was seeing the problem complaints dying down (or some were giving up on it).
Mine has continued to run pretty solid though. Now my laptop is another story. It had been fine when I was still on the same driver version as this desktop. But since then, I played around with updating its driver, and after that is when I started having issues. Hell it started crashing in other 3D things, not just Diablo 4. And when I say crash, I mean crash involving the Nvidia driver files, because that’s what would pop up when it happened.
Fortunately, I rarely play games on that laptop right now, I primarily use it write car estimates and do technical troubleshooting for networks. Things that don’t really tax the game feature side of the machine. Last night I spent time doing updates and updated the driver yet again.
Will see if the next time it plays I have any video crashes, but if it does, I may be going back to the older driver. Sad that I have to.
As for your comments about card malfunctions:
Yes, some cards can bow under their own weight. It puts diagonal stress on the GPU can actually cause the heatsink to be pulled away from some of the parts if it doesn’t flex with the board.
Not only that the slot as you mentioned can take some punishment over time, and the GPU board near the slot can even crack in extreme cases.
Mine came with a support bracket that you attach to 3 of the slots along side and below the card. Then it has a stiff arm that sticks out to prop up the card to prevent the weight of it from bearing down and hurting things over time.
I even went and bought a kit that will allow me to put the new GPU in vertically instead of horizontal, to help alleviate this for that one.
Until Season 3, the only crashes I had were with Uber Lilith. Now, my game is hard crashing (instant system reboot) 1-3x per hour. It does not seem to be tied to a specific zone or action. I just ran a 30 min memory test, no issues. 
Check for the dstorage file in the game folder. Rename or delete it. But keep in mind, it will get put back too.
Direct Storage has been causing some performance issues, crashing, etc, again with this latest round of patches.
Use -disableds CLI command instead until next patch release.
Link PezRadar’s post with yours when you are replying, so the everyone has the exact context.
Some may stick the CLI in the command line, and it shouldn’t be there.
All they need is JUST the
-disableds
-Diablo 4 crashes when it is loading - #85 by PezRadar
You should always try to reference a source, especially if its from an official forum representative.
What about if you play other games then? Any issue or it is just Diablo IV?
Well, if you are referring to this issue caused by direct storage, perhaps not.
The feature requires the game to be coded to use it.
Now, either there is a coding issue due to how its been added, what version of direct storage it was coded to work with, or that the system in question has a difference in how its setup that it apparently causes issues for several of you.
I know its operating on my system, I can see the dstorage file is in the game folder, but to date, no problems with it.
Tonight I just upgraded to a new video card and I’m now running the Jan 31st driver from this year to support the new card. Still running well though.
Yes, I think this works. I changed it from .dll to .bak, and everything has been fine since.
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