How I SOLVED my Fenris crashes from 1.1.1

Technical Support
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TL;DR:
Turn OFF any kind of dynamic overclocking.

Examples include:
Asus Motherboard AI Optimized OC
Gigabyte Motherboard OC Guru
MSI Motherboard OC Genie
MSI GPU Afterburner Software

You may be able to turn on a static XMP RAM Profile, because it’s STATIC.
Anything that is DYNAMICALLY changing CPU or RAM will crash Diablo 4.

Longer explanation:
I only know a scant amount of what I’m about to explain here. It will be vague, it will be a little speculatory and it might be that all of this doesn’t work for you. Try not to berate me for being inaccurate in places of this post, I’m just trying to help.

That said, as of this writing, I can reproduce a Fenris crash on demand by simply turning on my motherboard’s dynamic over clocking feature. When it’s turned off, the game never crashes, never experiences any disconnects and runs as smooth as glass. Why that didn’t affect the game before patch 1.1.1, I do not know.

How I figured it out:
Fenris crashes create memory dump files in addition to the FenrisDebug text files. Those memory dump files are in the same format of a Windows memory dump file and are readable by WinDbg. I read several dump files using WinDbg then had it analyze the dump and give me some discernable information about them. The one thing they all had in common, was a memory address access violation. They all also appeared to be encountering that access violation when trying to access a memory address that the game had previously written data to, or had defined with a specific data type. Like any application, Diablo 4 writes a value into a variable in memory, runs some kind of routine or array that changed it and the tried to access that memory address for the end result of the routine or array, but then received an access violation when trying to read the data. The mystifying part of that to me however, was the access violation was from Diablo 4 itself, not Windows. The memory addresses were different in every dump file I analyzed but the access violation was the same.

Diablo 4 uses a proprietary game engine. It’s Blizzard’s design and implementation as far as we know. They used a similar version for Diablo 3. It’s their code, not an out of the box engine like Unreal, Havok, or the many other engines that are used to make games. Whereas those game engines may not care that memory and CPU speeds are dynamically changing based upon the load being placed upon the system, what I believe is that Diablo 4’s engine does care or isn’t setup to deal with it. I’ll also guess that this may be on purpose as a result of so many “trainer” type of cheat programs that have been used over the years to read Diablo’s running memory and manipulate it, but I digress. Elden Ring is a somewhat recent game that also uses their own, proprietary engine and it ran perfectly with dynamic over clocking. Diablo 4 does not.

Therefore what I believe the issue boils down to is Diablo 4’s code (I believe C or C+ language) being VERY specific about data to written and read in memory. If your PC is using a dynamic over-clocking method for your system or graphics card memory, the data written to a memory address and then read from that same memory address is being considered as different by Diablo 4. Or Diablo 4 recognizes the conditions that the memory address was written to as different from the conditions that memory address is read from, or the dynamic over clocking is putting that value somewhere Diablo 4 didn’t intend it to go and thus it’s different memory in any case and the access violation occurs, crashing the game.

I started troubleshooting this using these steps:

  1. Turn off all over clocking of everything.
  2. Disable any XMP profile in the BIOS.
  3. Uninstall graphics driver and all associated components.
  4. Reboot whether you need to or not and reinstall graphics driver.
  5. Play Diablo 4.
  6. Does it work? If so, then enable your static XMP profile for your RAM (and make sure it’s not being set to run faster than your CPU supports, of course).
  7. Try again. Does it still work? Then one by one, you can try and enable over clocking of your CPU or GPU, but this is where you will likely encounter crashing.

As previously stated this may not work for everyone, but I hope it works for you, Wanderer. Happy gaming.

3 Likes
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No. If you have stability issues due to overclocking it doesn’t matter what kind of overclocking it is. Just make your system stable. That’s all you need to make the game work.

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I checked in my BIOS and none of my overclock settings are even on. I tried underclocking my CPU just for fun and it was just as crash prone. Whatever’s going on, I am nearly certain at this point that it’s software related because the game literally worked on my hardware four days ago with no changes to the settings.

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You may not know that your system is still overclocked.

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i can confirm this didnt work for me.

pretty annoyed because I knew not to login my HC toon but I did anyways… resulted in a crash as soon as I engaged a mob in a dungeon and came back fallen.

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This indirectly indicates system stability problems. For the game it does not matter in which slot the video card is located. This problem can be due to unstable operation of the memory controller in the processor. The other slot may be using data lines from the chipset, which can kind of take some of the load off.

Memory controller problems can be caused by overclocking. This includes XMP. Yes, XMP is also overclocking. Changing voltages, frequencies, timings, etc is all overclocking. And even without XMP the controller can be overclocked if more than two memory sticks are used and/or they are dual rank, etc

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what kind of reply is this? i may not know many things, but I guarantee I know more about my system settings than you do with this vague and baseless speculation.

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Of course it’s possible. But it could also be that you know nothing and are misleading us with your ignorance. We have no way to verify it, so we’ll just have to take your word for it.

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please just spare us all the smugness and get ready to eat crow when blizzard patches the game and the issue gets fixed.

2 Likes
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This is definitely a step worth trying for those still crashing frequently.

That said, I take issue with Blizzard on this. Some of us (me included) are using very expensive gaming PCs that were built specifically so we could play D4 at maximum fidelity.

If the only way to get a stable experience out of the game is to hamstring our machines because the game’s engine can’t deal with modern OC systems, that is D4’s problem, not ours. And that’s especially true if D4 is the only game that constantly crashes like this – and I’ve seen that specifically notated on many posts in this forum, including some of mine from June.

Further exacerbating this is that Blizzard has been totally silent, as far as I can tell, in the new batch of threads about crashing, post 1.1.1. “Further stability updates” don’t seem to have done much.

My crashing problems have been mostly alleviated now, but I shouldn’t have to neuter a machine I paid thousands to build in order to run a single game that keeps crashing because its engineers couldn’t figure out what apparently literally all other AAA developers could.

3 Likes
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Your problem is that you are trying to get the result as an exception based on the fact that your PC is new/expensive/good etc. This approach is wrong. You should forget about it. And troubleshoot according to the instructions that were made specifically for everyone who has the problem.

It doesn’t matter how much your PC costs. In fact, the more expensive it is, the worse the situation can be. Because modern performance enhancers focus on temperature, not on TDP limits and maximum frequency. Hence you get prohibitive heat dissipation, temperature and unstable performance. That’s your problem. You bought it for a lot of money and don’t want to do anything with it.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1086940/discussions/3/6045572169623039806/

Here a player with a good expensive PC has a problem in Baldurs Gate 3, but no problems in other games according to him. From his words we can conclude that he also has no problems with Diablo 4. Although most likely he will have the same here, just he has not played this game yet.

He has exactly the same approach as you and exactly the same wrong.

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Sorry your educational system failed you by not teaching you to read carefully, but I appreciate you taking the time to attempt to be helpful.

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That’s right. Just enjoy your misery and wait for patches.
Maybe there really is a problem with the game. Just don’t run around the forum with accusations, one informative post is enough.

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deleting because I actually got baited by an obvious troll. damn.

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1.1.2 is out now and my crashes have stopped. Seems like it was in fact a software issue and not a hardware problem.

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Not really, just got 3x Fenris crash in a row while trying to reroll a single item. Sh*t aint fixed, for me at least

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Lost 3 HC toons to Fenris Crash including my 92 HC today.

This game is utter dog water.

Uninstalling once and for all.

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I found another cause of the crashes is due to the type of monitor. I was troubleshooting crashes in Diablo IV for a client, tested their computer with a 1080P HDMI 60 Hz projector works fine, on a 27" Samsung monitor display port at 120Hz works fine. On their monitor a MSI Gsync model, crashes every time. If you have another monitor give that a try.

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