Web forums have apparently been lighting up of late thanks to a spike in crashes when playing Diablo 4 with an Nvidia RTX 40-series graphics card. Turns out the problem is being caused by Nvidia's Frame Generation technology.
Adam Fletcher, global community development director for all things Diablo-related at Blizzard, the company that publishes the Diablo series, explained thusly on X:
"Seen a few post about some crashing they are experiencing after season start. If you have a 40 series NVIDIA card, I’d recommend disabling frame generation for the time being. Team is looking into it with NVIDIA but this appears to be a larger culprit to some of these crashes."
The X thread below Fletcher's post suggests that disabling frame generation does indeed help to reduce the frequency of crashes. "Thanks, it solved the crash issue, it crashed almost 20 times today," said one X user, while another observed, "definitely helped when I turned the frame generation off. Was crashing every time I logged in or zoned, completely stopped when disabled."
Confusingly, not everyone with an RTX 40 board seems to be getting the crashes. "4070 here with latest drivers, no issues as far as I can tell. Everything maxed and 1440p w/ DLSS Quality and Frame Generation on. Played 6 hours or so," an X user said.
Seen a few post about some crashing they are experiencing after season start. If you have a 40 series NVIDIA card, I’d recommend disabling frame generation for the time being. Team is looking into it with NVIDIA but this appears to be a larger culprit to some of these crashes. 👍🏻May 15, 2024
At the same time, others are reporting crashes without frame gen and indeed on older Nvidia GPUs that do not support frame gen. "I have a 30 series with 14700k and 32gb ddr5 6000mhz RAM, I get crashes in game every so often without the setting in question on," said one Diablo 4 gamer.
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Frame Generation, of course, is the Nvidia rendering technology that creates whole new frames using various AI-accelerated algorithms and inserts them in between frames fully rendered by the GPU's 3D pipeline.
Frame gen increases the overall framerate and visual smoothness. However, because the frames are generated using predictions based on previous frames, those frames do not reflect user inputs and therefore do not reduce latency in the same way that a fully 3D-pipeline rendered frame would.
On Nvidia GPUs, frame gen is limited to the latest RTX 40-series of graphics cards, such as the RTX 4070 Super and RTX 4080. AMD has its own frame generation technology and as is often the case with AMD, it's available across a wider range of current and legacy GPUs.
There's no word as yet on when Blizzard and Nvidia will have a fix.
