PC Sounds like a Jet Engine

Not sure, but with the camera down at that front facing angle, it might be doing a lot of work culling or something. Or they might be forcing LOD0/hero level effects/filtering for everything. Or maybe even super sampling it since people want to view their character in all their glory, without jaggies galore. Like that window might actual be rendered at something absurdly large like 2x4k or something, even if you’re playing at 1080p

A lot of times, when they do animated portraits like that, they do some janky stuff where there character is duplicated in some monster closet under the map, but even still, it would have to probably do a custom depth pass. But either way, there’s still probably culling involved.

Hard to say, but I’m not going to risk getting banned RenderDoc’ing it to find out exactly what they are doing.

1 Like

The issue only happens on the Character tab and not Spirit Boons or Abilities. Even though they are using the same “window”.

It also ramps up in the Main Menu. The only constant is the Character model.


Adding this here so Tech can see that it’s reproducible on other people’s systems.

High res and all of the other things you listed are not resolving this.

It’s not normal, and we should not act like it’s normal. It’s a serious bug that can lead to hardware damage. And I’m shocked that Blizzard hasn’t replied to this yet.

3 Likes

As mentioned already, the FPS is capped and I have confirmed that the GPU is limiting FPS at the capped value. Fans are working as intended, ramping up and down depending on temp.

I would hardly say 120 is “high” especially for a 1080 resolution.

There are distinct visually different experiences from 60 to 120. I would agree that beyond that it would be very difficult to discern.


I appreciate you trying to help, but you are clearly not reading what the actual presenting problem is.

I’m having the same issue with similarish specs to the OP - 10900k, 3080 RTX, 32gb ram. I did what you suggested before even reading this thread and that was limiting my FPS - I locked mine as low as 80-90 fps and it still sounds like jets are taking off my my PC is putting of some MAJOR heat. My PC is working harder and producing more heat than it does when I play Cyberpunk 2077 with DLSS running as hard as I can at 1440 - there is no way this is right… something is up but in the meantime I’m going to keep my fps capped at 90fps still just to hopefully avoid any issues but I’d love to hear something from Blizzard on this.

1 Like

There are now eight (8) recent threads about this issue and Blizzard has not yet acknowledged it. Eight threads and more users who are experiencing the exact same issue with completely different PC components and manufacturers. This is clearly no long an isolated incidence.

2 Likes

You can leave most GPUs running 90-100C for years straight and might have to change the thermal paste once. They are rated to always run at those temps. Do you think crypto miners gave their GPUs a break or tried to limit the temps to something lower like 70C? No lol…

Just set it to 80-90, it’s still plenty fluid enough and you won’t notice much difference going from that to 120. Plus, this isn’t an FPS or anything.

Again, that is masking the issue. We should not have to play tech support and gimp our GPUs performance.

I repeat: it’s a bug. We are customers. We can’t act like this was a normal behavior of the game. It’s a serious issue. Stop defending Blizzard.

2 Likes
  1. You’re complaining that it’s getting hot
  2. It’s getting hot because it’s rendering more stuff on the screen, which increases GPU load=>heat
  3. You want to lower temperatures for when the screen is displaying that content(shouldn’t be more than 10% of your gaming time, unless you’re some weirdo that simps over your waifu in the character inventory screen)
  4. You’re given the solutions
  5. You complain that they aren’t solutions
  6. Repeat

It’s not a bug, it’s rendering more stuff… This isn’t rocket science.

It’s rendering 1 tiny character model. Which should be less demanding than large encounters with effects everywhere with shaders, lighting, ect.

Capping FPS to 60 is a bandaid. Stop white knighting.

1 Like

Say you don’t know anything about rendering, without saying it…

Here’s one easy way to crush a system: Make that render target camera render at 8196x8196 and update every frame… Then downscale to the smaller window that you see in the vendor screen.

Realistically, they need to set the vendor/inventory screens to be capped at 60fps or something (the rest of the game can stay high). Right now, it seems like the render targets are rendering every frame.

This is also why true planar reflections are pretty rare in games(mirrors): They are EXPENSIVE as hell, unless you degrade their quality real far.

1 Like

Everything you just said means it’s a game issue. Meaning blizzard can control it and it’s not the client side hardware.

Dense.

That’s not an issue, but could be optimized. Your GPU isn’t in danger running at 80C, it’s just inconvenient to you. Personally, I always try to design and code systems with power consumption optimizations in mind (things like limited main menus to a fixed 30 or 60fps, even if the game is set to run at 144)

Have you ever heard a PS4 Pro before when you’re playing a game in 4k? It sounds like a hair drier. I’d bet money it’s sitting they’re pegged at a thermal throttled 90C. Guess what, you can do that for years on end on those consoles… Are you going to call a company like Naughty Dogs dense for letting it do that?

2 Likes

That is literally a game development issue

1 Like

That isn’t literally anything, but it is a design choice, overlooked or not. Again, the compromise would be to add another checkbox, like they did for cutscene fps, to limit the update rate of the render targets in the vendor/inventory screens.

If you keep chasing down that rabbit hole, then all modern games would have PS4 level graphics right now and the GPUs would be running at 50C. Or you’d have to wait 2-4 more GPU generations to run today’s games at cooler temps, on high settings and refresh rates lol…

1 Like

It literally is when something that should be minimally GPU intensive is maxing out to the point of hitting the limiter while the rest of the game hovers around 45%.

It’s an issue that they clearly overlooked.

1 Like

I hate to be that person, but you’re not educated enough in the matter to formulate an actual opinion on it. There’s a lot more to the equation than you’d think and I’ve barely scratched the surface of it with what I’ve talked about.

But I will emphasize it again in saying that it’s a lot more taxing than you’d think.

Because they over looked it. It would be one thing it the game itself was taxing and required a lot of Utilization throughout or even during any other point. It’s a complete design and development issue.

1 Like

Here, I whipped up a quick example to show you what I’m talking about. This is only using a 2048x2048 render target, but this is how much it can crush the GPU when updating every frame:

https://imgur.com/a/AE6rRvc

Compression kills the quality, but it was vsync locked to 120fps(probably more head room if I removed the cap) and when I open the inventory, it drops to 50fps. Granted, this is a pretty extreme example, but this is what I’m talking about: It’s not as simple and cheap as you’d think.

1 Like