Ok so I’m sure nobody will pay attention to this but I hope someone from Blizz can see it because it highlights a few issues I think could/should be fixed.
I wanna start this by pointing out the D4 release has been, for the most part, incredibly smooth so I don’t want to turn this into some sort of dev bashing or anything because I really like this game so my focus here is trying to help point out a few issues.
First of all, my specs:
- CPU Intel 12700f
- GPU nvidia RTX 4070Ti
- RAM 32 GB
- Kingston KC3000 2TB SSD
- Windows 11
- All latest windows updates and drivers installed.
1.- DLSS3 doesn’t work at all:
I don’t know whether other people have this problem but when activating DLSS3 frame generation I get absolutely zero FPS benefit, and in some instances I even experience FPS degradation. To make sure this wasn’t a VRAM issue I took down the textures to the lowest setting, but DLSS3 still does nothing. As a 4k gamer, DLSS3 working correctly would probably allow me to go beyond the 120fps that cap my monitor, so I’m expecting an update on this.
2.- Stuttering: Luckily this is limited to loading areas and the start of a session and doesn’t affect moment to moment gameplay, but still, entering any new area induces a huge increase in frame times for a few seconds, resulting in large stutters. I generally just wait for a couple of seconds at the entrance until they stop, but that shouldn’t be necessary. I believe this is related to the 12GB capacity of my GPU, but considering the look of the game, there’s no reason this should happen, and even taking textures down from ultra to high (Which releases around 4GB of VRAM with the high resolution assets pack installed) still results in this issue being present. This needs to be corrected.
This problem is particularly annoying when you open up the inventory or any NPC vendor screens, or the map, as the stuttering there is extreme for a few seconds, only to normalize later. These screens aren’t particularly intensive graphically either, so there’s definitely something wrong here.
3.- High textures are very low quality: The degradation in quality from ultra textures to high textures with the high resolution assets installed is extreme, and way beyond what normally would be observed in most games. I understand my GPU has limited VRAM and that’s fine, but there’s no reason the “high” textures setting should look so bad. Maybe I could take the textures down from ultra to high if that weren’t the case.
4.- FPS loss in some circumstances: I have no idea why, but any menu screens overlayed over the game result in a loss of around 30%-40% of my FPS. If I open any vendor for example, FPS comes down from 90 which is my typical FPS with everything maxed at DLSS2 Quality, all the way down to around 50. This makes absolutely zero sense, and I really don’t understand why it happens.
5.- Enemy monster models disappearing: This has apparently been fixed now, but since I’m not sure I’ll describe it anyway. Sometimes enemy models just disappear, only showing their weapons floating in the air. Seems to happen especially frequently with spiders and goatmen for some reason. I managed to work around this issue by reducing the “geometrical complexity” setting to low, which I have corrected now to high with no further issues.
6.- Microstutter/FPS minor instability: There’s definitely some frame instability going on as evidenced on the frametime graph on RTSS. The line is never fully straight, there’s always some fluctuations that result in either a “jumpy” aspect most of the time with VSYNC activated, or in very evident frame tearing with VSYNC deactivated. The only way to fix this would be to cap at 60, but I’m not sure I want to do that.
7.- Significant FPS difference with server slam: Here I truly do not understand what happened, with the same hardware at ultra, I played the server slam at pretty much a constant locked 116 fps (No idea why it wouldn’t lock at 120 instead, but it was locked), with a constantly straight frametime graph and no issues at all, very little area loading stutter, and no issue with the menu screens. For some reason the retail version runs for me at around 30fps less (or 25-30% performance loss). This tells me the current problems are probably fixable.
That’s all. In general you guys delivered an excellent game and the fact I can play on my steam deck too without issues and with the game looking great on the small screen speaks to the optimization done, but there’s still some issues with higher end hardware you can fix.
Thank you for an awesome game, been enjoying it a lot, hope you read this.