Diablo IV beta is burning RTX 3080 Ti GPUs

Recent reports suggest that some RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards are performing horribly, or even dying, while playing the Diablo IV closed beta over the weekend.

In what appears to be a very similar issue to when Amazon’s MMO New World was crashing RTX 3090 GPUs, the Diablo 4 beta appears to be exposing a potentially fatal flaw in some high-end Nvidia GPUs.

On Reddit and the Blizzard forums, users report that during the beta their monitors turn black, the GPU fans run at full speed, and their system reboots. Sometimes these symptoms are also accompanied by an error code and a dead GPU, though not always.

It appears that most of the users affected by the issue are using RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards made by Esports Extrasbyte, however the extent of the issue is not yet known.

YouTuber Mortismal Gaming also points out that they suffered from the same issue on a Esports Extrasbyte RTX 3080 Ti graphics card while gaming.

Diablo 4 is unlikely to be the cause of the issue itself, rather a catalyst to expose a weakness that may have been present in the affected cards. This was the case of the New World. EVGA noticed some poor soldering (opens in a new tab) on a batch of their cards which, when running at extremely high frame rates and spiked loading, in that case while playing New World, would result in failure.

The Diablo IV team is investigating reports of RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards crashing or dying while playing the closed beta version of the game. Customer service says that Blizzard is “working closely with Nvidia to identify affected hardware configurations and collect as many data points as possible to assist in the investigation.”

For affected users, the team offers the following advice in a forum thread:

If your card still doesn’t work, try these troubleshooting steps:

• Do a full power cycle (AC OFF->AC ON) and see if the GPU can be detected in Windows.
• If GPU can be found in Windows, perform a clean install of the driver.