I played in the Server Slam for Diablo and experienced these intense FPS drops every 30 minutes or so. They lasted anywhere from about 5-15 minutes. During that time, the game stuttered really badly. Since it was the beta, I didn’t think anything of it and chalked it up to be a bug that may get ironed out.
The other day, during Day 1, I experienced those same lag spikes, so I went to investigate. I noticed that while playing Diablo and running Wallpaper Engine, the lag occurs when they flip in priority on my PC. In other words, Diablo is using a high proportion of my CPU and GPU; when the lag happens, Wallpaper Engine is suddenly a higher proportion. When I turned Wallpaper Engine off completely, I did not experience any more lag spikes.
I am running an I7/3080Ti water-cooled, 32 GB RAM, with Diablo 4 on an NVME. I also play other (arguably more intense games) like Crisis, Cyberpunk, and Hogwarts, WITH Wallpaper Engine running, and experience ZERO issues related to spikes. I have NEVER experienced an issue with Wallpaper Engine causing a slowdown in my gaming performance.
So this is not a hardware issue. And it doesn’t make sense for it to be Wallpaper Engines, either. It seems to be something wrong with Diablo IV, or at the very least, the interaction between Diablo IV and Wallpaper Engine (or the way Diablo IV is prioritized by the PC when Wallpaper Engine is running)
I have decided to turn it off while running the game, but I really don’t feel like I should have to do that, especially considering it has ZERO major impacts on all other games. I am wondering if anyone else is experiencing these spikes and has figured out why this may be happening. Maybe it’s an allocation issue/actual bug that needs to be looked into.
Posted about this on the Diablo 4 discord and Reddit. There appear to be other people experiencing the same issue. Many of the users, including myself, have powerful computers (i9/i7 & 3080s) that should not be struggling to keep up. The issue is also sporadic, so it’s not like the load is too much all the time. I think this may be an allocation issue that pops up. Not sure WHAT causes it to suddenly occur. Typically, I had it happen when changing loading zones, but this was not always the case.
