After a very long time of trying to figure out why my game randomly disconnects and freezes. I think I have finally resolved the issues. I know it was super frustrating for me. Hopefully this will save someone else some frustration.
Below are thee changes that appear to have helped me with my random Diablo 4 issues. The third one adjusting the MTU setting was needed to stabilize my VPN at work. I really think this is what resolved the disconnects for me.
My OS is Windows 10 Pro
Start the game as Administrator.
Right click Diablo IV.exe and choose properties
Click Compatibility tab
Check Run this program as an administrator
Unchecking core zero. If you have multiple cores with your processor you might want to try this. Once in a while the game would freeze on me. When I did this the game stopped freezing. I used to have to go to the task manager and end task due to the game freezing.
Open Task Manager
Click Details tab
Right click Diablo IV.exe
Click Set Affinity
Uncheck CPU 0
Click OK
I use TMobile home internet. I live way out in the country. I had to change my MTU setting and I no longer experience random disconnects. I didn’t even know what an MTU was.
Right Click Command Prompt
Click Run as Administrator
This command displays your MTU settings: netsh interface ipv4 show subinterface
This command changes your MTU settings, change “Wi-Fi” to your internet name: netsh interface ipv4 set interface “Wi-Fi” mtu=1480
I am glad it helped. The only negative is that Windows doesn’t save the core change permanently. It is saved until you log out of Diablo 4. I use a tool called Process Lasso that saves it permanently.
Hello Greysmith, it looks like it worked for me too. It did reduce my frame rate but the crash on exiting the game and the disconnects seem to have gone away, at least for now. There was a little game delay upon entering the Helltide event but other than that it seems to be good. Thanks!
I assume my issue isn’t the same as yours as this didn’t work for me. It did have about 30 seconds of studdering before it smoothed out, but it worked fine until the crashes returned.
Originally, my issue was mostly upon portal or when in town and within the first 15 minutes of launch, but a graphics card update seems to have resolved that issue along with minimizing some graphics settings.
Now, my issue seems to be predominantly within the first 15 minutes of launch and during the heat of some battles, then settles out for one to two hours (unsure after that since my ol’bones can’t sit much longer than that).
There are some variables to consider. Do you use an SSD or a HDD? If you use an HDD make sure your drive cache is large enough for the game and everything else on your PC. I am going to assume you don’t have the most fancy expensive graphics (nether do I). As a general rule I turn anything that has the word Geometic or Geometry to low, fog, fur, and reflection quality to low. anti-aliasing quality to low, anything with the word shadow to low and along with water simulation. Make sure to check Low FX. I also turn off Distortion. You can leave Anisotropic Filtering to high as it has a minor affect on performance. I hope that helps. I was just looking at my settings so I didn’t care about grammar or sentence structure. Your mileage may vary.
Scott, thank you for the interest in my issue. I’m using SSD.
As to graphic settings, turning them down definitely have had a positive outcome already, but I’ll look a bit deeper based upon your suggestions.
I used to understand all this before retirement (owner of animation/development studio and personally a programmer in the early days /facepalm), but the strokes took a chunk out of the ol’noggin, so I’ll try to keep up!
Thank you.
EDIT: Unfortunately, it appears my issue lies elsewhere as things have continued with the adjustments suggested. However, I’ll let you know if I find the source in case anyone has similar issues. Thanks again.
Sounds like you covered all your bases. Just to make sure I am on the same page as you did you try both bullets 1 and 2 at the top of this post? Option 2 really helped me with the stuttering.
I am not an expert on SSD drives but I know some have slow data read/writes. I would double check the make/model of the SSD and then google it to see if it is considered a slow SSD. I have a very large cheap SSD that is slow but I use it to back up my system. Speed wasn’t a concern for me.
Your issue of “the first 15 minutes of launch” and “in the heat of battle” sounds like it could be either a HDD cache (also called page file) or a shader cache issue. Since you stated you have an SSD I would rule out the HDD cache. Do you have any system clean up programs such as ccleaner running? If you do make sure it isn’t cleaning (deleting) the shader cache. If the shader cache is being deleted or reset then the game has to recreate the shader cache and it often only creates them as it needs them so if you go into a populated area it could be trying to create all the shaders and that could slow your machine down. The good thing is that once the game creates the shaders it reuses them.
Those are all the bases that I normally cover for any gaming issues that I have. Sometimes (rarely) I deliberately reset the shader cache when I want it to create new fresh shaders due to me altering the video settings.
One last thing. Blizzard made a change a while back that caused the game to be unplayable for me. I updated drives, changed settings, everything that you are doing now. Then I noticed that there was a BIOS upgrade. I have Ryzen 5 with onboard graphics. The BIOS upgrade gave the option to dedicate more memory to the onboard graphics.
Updating the BIOS, changing the dedicated memory to max for the onboard graphics, and doing bullet 2 in my original post above (uncheck core zero from the Diablo 4 executable) resolved my stuttering and rubber banding. I completely forgot about the BIOS upgrade.
With that I am out of ideas. I am sorry, wish I could be more help.
SSD do not have slow read/write. Mine has a xfer rating of 7300Mb/s (yes, that’s 7.3Gb/sec.), just short of 1GB/s. There are slower nVME SSDs, I bought the fastest I could afford. I don’t think there are many that are faster than 7300 and if so, they probably cost a small fortune. The total rating of xfer is 7300. That’s not just read speed. SSDs do write slower than they read, all drives do in my experience, but they are quantum leaps ahead of any HDD in reads and writes.
I think perhaps I misunderstood what you mean by this? SSD vs HDD there is no contest. a hardware Mobo installed nVME SSD is the fastest. I also have a SATA SSD that has a transfer speed of 540MB/s (4300Mb/sec). My fastest SATA HDD at 7200rpm has a max xfer rate of 80MB/s. I am using the industry std MB(cap B)=Bytes, lower case = bits. Just so you know when reading this. Some posters don’t pay attn to that very important distinction.
SATA3 has a max xfer spec of 6GB/sec, so that is def not a bottleneck… The bus is the bottleneck. nVME install directly into the mobo as M.2 specification xfer. I don’t recall the parameters of the M.2 standard. I do know that has a much higher max limit than SATA. If you’ve seen that “SSD’s write slower” it’s true, they do, in relation to read speed. They still write MUCH faster than a HDD.
You sound like you know what you’re talking about with systems, I’m just explaining some things you may not have known about HDD vs SSD and the differences in busses and standards they use. You said you are no expert on SSD’s. Hopefully this helped.
–
BTW I played with affinity as well as Priority of Diablo IV.exe. It did improve stutter and everything seems more fluid in the game, but every time I use a portal, I am afraid it will DC. Just about all of my DCs happen upon arrival after using a portal. I think I’ve been DC’d randomly maybe 2 or 3x total since release of Season 4. Prior to S4 it was a very common thing to just get kicked or even get ta reboot, with or without BSOD. I still get DC’d no matter what I do. I do it for the stutter issue, but I still het portal DC’d.
IDK why Windows ships with a MTU of 1500. I always use 1480. 16 bit Dword+4bit overhead as a buffer. It helps prevent packet loss.
PowerShell and even DOS cmd parser can do both. Affinity is Hex and requires a conversion as a value, since its based on how many cores the host system has. You can do a GET()n command to get the number of cores and their values within the program and then use those values to apply the algorithm so it will work on any system since it varies by system, but you can do that programmatically within your ps or batch file. There are a lot of websites that explain how to do it, with examples. You can’t do it at startup. The process you want to work with must be active. There are ways to set triggers in Win, if this event occurs, run this file, etc. Task scheduler can do it and you don’t have to be a programmer to use it. ) Trigger=D4 Launches, action=Run “myD4PriorityAffinitySetter.” cmd or bat or shell(your file you crated) make sure to set it run as admin of course, Whatever you used to create it.
Every time you start D4, that triggers will run your affetti and priority setter on process Diablo IV.exe. Or any other process(es) you want to do this with.