Blizzard And NVIDIA Are Looking Into Claims Diablo IV Is Bricking GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPUs
User reports are claiming that Diablo 4 is bricking Gigabyte and ASUS RTX 3080 Ti's in the game’s new open beta. Affected gamers have been rushing to the Blizzard forums for several days now, sharing their experiences of dead cards and asking for assistance. No one knows the exact reason for the GPU failures, however, the failures are allegedly consistent among Gigabyte RTX 3080 Ti's (i.e. no AORUS models are reported to be dying), suggesting the issue is a GPU power delivery failure of some kind. Thankfully, Blizzard is looking into the matter and asking for feedback from affected users to rectify the problem.
The RTX 3080 Ti failures began cropping up six days ago when a swarm of reports hit the Blizzard PC technical support sub-forum, confirming the death of several RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards. Since then, there have been multiple more threads about failing RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards. Unfortunately, nobody knows what type of workload is killing these cards since the GPU deaths are happening in a number of different areas of the game, including some instances where the GPUs are only playing a 30FPS cut scene which should not put any significant load on the GPU.
Bizarrely, Gigabyte RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards hold the vast majority of these affected GPUs, with a few ASUS RTX 3080 Ti’s also sprinkled in. A few other GPUs have reportedly been dying with Diablo 4, including some Gigabyte RTX 3090s. However, there are not enough of these other GPUs to really warrant a valid case. We don’t know why Gigabyte’s RTX 3080 Ti’s are so impacted; however, there’s good reason to suspect a batch of RTX 3080 Ti’s is defective due to bad soldering on the GPU’s MOSFET circuits.
This was an issue reported by EVGA during the New World GPU catastrophe, where many RTX 3090’s were dying in even higher numbers compared to what we’re seeing in Diablo 4. While EVGA was most affected, Gigabyte RTX 3090’s were not immune then either, so it is possible that the same soldering problem is related to both brands. This makes even more sense, considering Gigabyte-branded cards are the only reported models to be dying, and not any RTX 3080 Ti models utilizing Gigabyte's higher class AORUS branding with their higher-quality power delivery systems.
However, this is just an educated guess on our part, since Blizzard and NVIDIA have not confirmed the actual cause of the GPU deaths. The best way to protect yourself, for now, is to simply not play the Diablo 4 Beta. But if you choose to play, you should try installing NVIDIA’s latest Game Ready driver that officially support the Diablo 4 beta – by off-chance it fixes these GPU failures. A few other precautions you can take is to cap your frame rate to the refresh rate of your monitor (with a frame rate limiter or V-Sync) and reduce the power limit of your GPU with overclocking software like EVGA Precision or MSI Afterburner. Both of these ideas aim to reduce the amount of voltage and amperage the GPU undertakes when rendering Diablo 4 and thereby reduce the chance of high voltage spikes potentially breaking any defective soldering points.
