Diablo 4 might brick your high-end graphics card

The world of PC gaming is abuzz with news about Diablo 4, Blizzard’s latest and most graphically-intense delve into its beloved dungeon crawler series. The invite-only beta is making those left out green with envy, but you might want to hold off if you have specific models of high-end desktop GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia. A small number of initial players are reporting that their graphics cards have been dying while playing the new game.

User communities across the web are reporting unexpected GPU failures while playing Diablo 4 in sessions as short as 20 minutes, and they go far beyond the usual Windows graphics crash. While the number of affected users seems to be relatively small at the moment, Tom’s Hardware has tabulated that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is the most common card that shows problems, in various versions from Gigabyte, EVGA, and other vendors. At least one player each reported the same failure for the less-powerful RTX 3080 and the Radeon RX 6900 XT. At the time of writing less than 20 total users are reporting catastrophic problems.

Afflicted cards cause the PC to crash, with some giving a slight warning of haywire cooling fans just before. Upon a reboot the video doesn’t return unless the user switches to another card or integrated graphics, which tends to be the point at which an RMA return is the best solution. This situation is eerily reminiscent of when Amazon’s New World MMO was bricking RTX 3090 cards.

The number of users reporting this problem is so small that it’s probably unlikely to deter players from trying out Diablo 4. Even if it’s ten times the number of people who’ve been active on the forums at this point, that would be a tiny fraction of Blizzard’s total beta players. Even so, Blizzard, Nvidia, and the various partner manufacturers should be taking note and trying to get to the bottom of the issue.