Hello and welcome to my first blog entry, which I want to dedicate to Activison Blizzard's newly released Diablo 2 Resurrected (D2R for short), a remaster of the legendary ARPG Diablo 2 and its Lord of Destruction expansion.
After a more or less stable beta, the game seems to be riddled with client and server bugs after launch. Server problems aside, stability is a big issue momentarily, especially if you're running D2R on a 4, 5 years old system. The game crashes randomly for seemingly no reason, whether you log in, play, or just sit idle in the game lobby. According to player reports, D2R also seems to tax even the finest gaming PC’s with very high GPU usage/heating and VRAM usage up to about 8(!) GB. It appears that the game causes few or no problems if you have a newer 12 GB graphics card.
After several days of Internet research, I concluded that the extremely resource-hungry game pushes your system to such an extent that automatic throttling very likely kicks in, resulting in the random crashes. The interaction between VRAM, RAM and HDD also seems to get out of hand when the game is running at full capacity. So, here’s what I did to stabilize my dated PC (i5-4460, GTX 960, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SATA HDD):
Downgrade the Nvidia driver from 472.12 (current with D2R support) to the more stable 471.11 (June 22, 2021). Uninstall the 472.12 driver incl. Geforce Experience/Shadowplay and Nvidia Control Panel (if installed). Then install the 471.11 driver only, without Geforce Experience/Shadowplay. You can search for and download older Nivida drivers here.
Upgrade Windows 10 with the latest optional Windows 10 Version 21H1 patch. It fixes, among other things, system bugs. You can access and download the upgrade via "Search for Updates" in Windows 10.
Install MSI Afterburner and underclock the GPU Core Clock by approximately -50 to -80 MHz. This prevents overheating/throttling. Save the setting as a profile. Remember that if the app has not been set to Autostart for Windows, MSI Afterburner has to be started manually every time before playing and the profile has to be applied to the GPU. You can download MSI Afterburner here.
Play the game in fullscreen mode and don’t run any other apps, browsers, mail programs etc in the background while playing
So far D2R, using the default "Medium" video preset for my PC with AA turned off, finally seems to run stable. I report back if this changes. Good luck!
Note: This is a temporary workaround until the devs have fixed the issues.
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