The Diablo 4 beta has been bricking graphics cards

[midian182]

WTF?! Several people who took part in the Diablo 4 early access beta have claimed that the game bricked their graphics card, with dozens of user reports on various forums stating that their expensive GPU was fried while playing Blizzard's title. In the majority of instances, the RTX 3080 Ti was affected, most of which came from Gigabyte.

Diablo 4's early access beta took place over the weekend, and while there have been some complaints about bugs and wait times, most of the early reviews are positive. But based on several reports, it seems that many RTX 3080 Ti owners didn't have a good time with the game.

In a Reddit post titled 'Diablo 4 just bricked my 3080 TI,' a user writes that they had been playing the game for 20 minutes when, during a cutscene in the chapel, their monitors turned off. After restarting their PC, the motherboard posted error code 97. They write that their Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Vision OC 12G is now dead. Another user said their same model of card was also bricked during this cutscene.

Similar reports have appeared on Blizzard's own forums. One user claims their RTX 3080 Ti burned out after a few minutes of playing Diablo 4, while another says their fans maxed out and monitors went off on two separate occasions, killing their 15-month-old card.

One impacted player who submitted a ticket to Blizzard received a reply from the company with a link to its Terms of Service, which states that Blizzard isn't liable for any damage to a machine when running a game in beta.

There are also reports of RTX 3080 Ti models from EVGA being bricked. The issue doesn't appear limited to that card; RTX 3080 and Radeon RX 6900 XT owners say Diablo 4 destroyed their cards, too.

This isn't the first time we've heard of betas killing GPUs. Amazon's New World beta bricked several EVGA RTX 3090 cards in 2021. It was initially blamed on the game's lack of a frame rate limiter, but EVGA later said it was due to poor soldering around the card's MOSFET circuits. Whether a similar hardware fault is responsible for the Diablo 4 incidents is unclear.

The Diablo 4 open beta takes begins this Friday (March 24), running up until March 26.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/98046-diablo-4-beta-has-bricking-graphics-cards.html

 

[James Ryan]

Apparently the game is great though!
Also LTT getting hacked and terminated today is pretty wild.
Looking forward to that article soon.

 

[Beerfloat]

April 1st already?

Pretty sure this is going to be another nothingburger.

 

[Eldritch]

Don't preorder. Period.

You risked your money on an unreleased game, they made you unpaid testers and even destroyed your expensive hardware!

Why on earth is pre-order of games and unpaid beta testing still a thing?

 

[Ohnooze]

How is this even possible?
From a technical point of view I don't understand how a game could burn up a gpu.

 

[KofeViR]

How is this even possible?
From a technical point of view I don't understand how a game could burn up a gpu.

It can't, would probably have been bricked regardless of game

 

[Ohnooze]

It can't, would probably have been bricked regardless of game

Yeah I mean we push our cards to the limit every day. I don't know, maybe I'm not tech savvy enough to understand but it does not seem logical to me.

 

[cldmstrsn]

Interesting. I played all weekend on both my desktop (4090) and my laptop (1070) and they both ran great. So I wonder what was going on with the people whos cards did break.

 

[KofeViR]

Yeah I mean we push our cards to the limit every day. I don't know, maybe I'm not tech savvy enough to understand but it does not seem logical to me.

Yeah Diablo 4 will probably run 200 fps with a 3080 Ti with 20% GPU usage

 

[Ohnooze]

Yeah Diablo 4 will probably run 200 fps with a 3080 Ti with 20% GPU usage

But even if it were the most demanding game ever your gpu will always have a limit where it caps out it's performance.
Unless the problem is something other than heat...hell I don't know.

 

[Prrredictable]

This headline is silly. Without any proof beyond anecdotal evidence from reddit, TS is blaming a game demo on a hardware failure. You even acknowledge that the "last time" this happened it had nothing to do with the game, per the manufacture of the GPU, and STILL blame the failure on a game demo.

At any rate, I put about 12-13 hours into the beta and it ran close to flawlessly. In fact, the only issues I encountered were some off-sync audio early on in a couple of cutscenes.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Don't preorder. Period.

You risked your money on an unreleased game, they made you unpaid testers and even destroyed your expensive hardware!

Why on earth is pre-order of games and unpaid beta testing still a thing?

Because L33T GAMURZ have gotta CONSOOM product, regardless of its quality. The gaming industry has proved repeatedly over the last 10 years that its consoomers will buy literally anything, no matter how broken, overtly paywalled, or insulting to its audience. Reputations simply dont matter, they will consoom product then get excited for next product.

 

[Nobina]

How is this even possible?
From a technical point of view I don't understand how a game could burn up a gpu.

If there was a way for software to brick GPUs and hackers figured out what causes it, they would have a lot of fun burning people's cards down.

 

[geo2160]

Yeah Diablo 4 will probably run 200 fps with a 3080 Ti with 20% GPU usage

It doesn't, trust me. I had to enable DLSS to get over 60fps@4k on a 10gb 3080. D4 is very demanding for a blizzard game. RTX will tank performance even more, when they'll implement it.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

But even if it were the most demanding game ever your gpu will always have a limit where it caps out it's performance.
Unless the problem is something other than heat...hell I don't know.

That's what everyone thought with new world as well. Then it turned out the strain it was placing on the GPU seemed to be causing some issues with lower quality (mainly EVGA) cards when the FPS cap was unlocked. Which it was by default.

 

[Ohnooze]

That's what everyone thought with new world as well. Then it turned out the strain it was placing on the GPU seemed to be causing some issues with lower quality (mainly EVGA) cards when the FPS cap was unlocked. Which it was by default.

I guess that's what I don't understand. How can more intense graphics cause it overheat?
Would seem that the card would run at max and be capped out but that's generally how it works....so yeah I don't get it.

 

[opinali]

That's what everyone thought with new world as well. Then it turned out the strain it was placing on the GPU seemed to be causing some issues with lower quality (mainly EVGA) cards when the FPS cap was unlocked. Which it was by default.

Well EVGA is not in the GPU market anymore. And these AIB PCBs are supposedly validated by NVidia. Now apparenty it's multiple models not just one brand. At some point people should start pointing their finger at NVidia.

 

[kimo1]

An actual deal with Satan: you get to play Diablo early, but you sacrifice your high-end GPU.

I wonder if this issue is a mix of faulty GPUs and poor, or even, evil programming...

Does the demo have some sort of DRM that may mess with hardware? I remember back in the old days there was this nasty DRM called StarForce. It locked hardware to work as the DRM wanted, but, the lock remained permanently even after uninstalling the SF DRM rootkit. The new lock made the OS unstable, turned CD drive into garbage and other, non SF DRM protected games, couldn't run properly anymore. StarForce DRM trashed 3 of my PCs until I finally found out what it actually was.

 

[fadingfool]

Obviously must be using the POKE 59458,62 command.....

(showing my age)

 

[Stingy McDuck]

Didn't something similar happened with Starcraft 2 back in the day?

 

[waclark]

Well EVGA is not in the GPU market anymore. And these AIB PCBs are supposedly validated by NVidia. Now apparenty it's multiple models not just one brand. At some point people should start pointing their finger at NVidia.

In the case of New World, it was the manufacturer. As I understand it, it was bad solder joints on the card. That's not an NVidia issue.

 

[waclark]

Obviously must be using the POKE 59458,62 command.....

(showing my age)

Probably too many pokes, and not enough peeks.

 

[brucek]

By definition anytime the software application layer can cause the hardware layer beneath it to permanently brick vs. say trigger say an overheat shutdown condition, that must be a flaw in the hardware or its design, right?

Another interpretation might be that cards have background failure rates, and that the only thing unusual about last weekend was that a lot of gamers were all playing the same beta, and it was new to many of them, leading them to believe that anything that happened that particular weekend must be the fault of that beta.

(I do believe the beta has unoptimized parts that cause more GPU load than anticipated, but then again players pushing their GPUs is not supposed to be an unexpected condition.)

 

[MGSachiel]

Diablo 4, New World, or FurMark are not bricking your GPU. Software isn't the problem. There's no super secret code that's directly talking to the GPU, overriding protections, and bricking hardware. This is a cooling issue or bad thermal design plain and simple. There's 3 levels of protection GPUs utilize to prevent damage:

1st) Driver-based throttling - the driver will limit instructions sent to GPU if it notices core temps becoming too high.
2nd) Firmware-based throttling - the GPU will lower card clock speed to reduce heat.
3rd) Hardware-based throttling - there's a physical thermal diode in most all CPUs/GPUs that will shut the hardware off before permanent damage is done from heat.

If a protection fails, GPU hands off to the next layers of protection and if all three fail, that's when you start seeing reports of bricked cards.

My guess is the 30 series in general or certain AIB partner cards either don't have sufficient pads/paste/putty to cool the cards, or it's because Nvidia's insistence on clocking newer series cards to bonkers levels out of the factory. I don't know enough about the 30 series thermal design to say what's causing this, whether it's faulty thermal diodes, lack of temperature monitoring, or cards slowly dying due to insane wattage. Either way, just watch your temps people. Undervolt if you have to; we've seen huge wattage/thermal drops and minimal performance impact from doing this.

 

[Avro Arrow]

I've said it before and I'll say it again...

"NEVER BE AN EARLY ADOPTER!"

Some people just never learn.