The Diablo IV Beta Early Access opened up last weekend and despite the bugs, glitches, and that it’s not the full game, the general consensus is that the players, present company included, just can’t get enough of it and that we can’t wait for it to roll out officially. However, for the select few that played the game on PC and on an NVIDIA GPU, the game imparted more than just glitches: it outright bricked their graphics card.
It all began with a Diablo 4 thread on Reddit. According to the threadstarter (TS) of the post, mkp0203, they had been playing the beta no longer than 20 minutes when their monitor suddenly just turned off. After restarting their system, their motherboard began posting error code 97, which meant that his graphics card, a Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Vision, was dead in the water.
This doesn’t appear to be an isolated incident either – others who played the Diablo IV beta early and on their PCs shared similar experiences on the official Blizzard forums. Some said that they experienced the same display cutoff, while others said that the fans on their graphics cards would suddenly ramp up to full speed, and only by resetting their system would the situation return to normal. For some that experienced the latter, it would “brick” their GPUs.
There are also a couple of patterns to these stories. Firstly, the graphics cards bricked by the Diablo IV beta were all NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series cards and more specifically, the RTX 3080 Ti. Second, and based on numerous complaints on the forums, it appears that one possible culprit behind the murder of expensive hardware is “uncapped” framerates.
If this sounds eerily familiar, that’s because back in 2021, Amazon’s MMORPG, New World, was bricking NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs, and more specifically, models that were made by EVGA and Gigabyte. Back then, the signs that these cards were about to get bricked were similar to what Diablo IV is doing as well: the fans would ramp up furiously, their displays going black, before their system abruptly shuts down.
At the time of writing, it is unclear if Blizzard has been made aware of this issue with the Diablo IV Beta and NVIDIA’s higher-end GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards. The silver lining here is that the game is still in beta, so there is a high likelihood that this issue will be fixed before the game’s official launch in June.
(Source: Reddit [1] [2], Blizzard Forums [1] [2] [3])
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