During both betas of the game everything worked perfectly on my old PC (6th gen I7, GTX1070, 16gb ram), I experienced no crashes and steady framerate.
After betas I purchased a new PC, I9 13900K, 32Gb@6000, RTX 4070, X790 chipset. 3x monitor setup, mid monitor is 144hz 1440P, both left and right are older 4K 60hz.
During pre-season – I played with every setting maxed on ultra with a framerate of 144 @1440p resolution. I can’t remember what options were available then, but I had everything set to ultra.
During season 1 I didn’t play much (because leveling speed was abysmal, but that’s decent now) but frames were steady and there were no crashes. Loading times are about 4-6 secs so it worked decently fine too.
Problems began with season 2. It started slowly with occasional game crash, specifically during teleportation to towns from somewhere on the map or dungeon, but it was rare, maybe 2-3 times during 4-5 hours play time so I didn’t think much of it.
When the 1st patch dropped, crashes increased exponentially. It started to crash very often when teleporting in any way, sometimes even when opening menus. Also, when the game crashed, it no longer offered any crash report submission, and I sometimes got a message that the game didn’t save properly and to wait when trying to relog. I cannot remember what exactly I did to make it slightly more stable, think I dropped DLSS to balanced or something and it reduced to a crash every 45min to hour or so. Not really acceptable for a AAA game, but allright, early seasons… I was not happy with it, but it didn’t crash when I was in some action so I just waited for the next patch hoping it was reported before and that it’s going to get patched.
Then the 2nd patch happened and the issues got so severe that the game at current settings was unplayable.
It crashed for any reason. Any teleport, opening menu, opening map, opening friends list, opening achievements or seasonal menu, work at any vendor. All those activities had a chance to crash, with teleporting to town being as severe as 50%. And trying to opening achievements menu sometimes several times in a row. New issue I had that I had to try to relog up to 10 times to even manage to get in pre-game stable enough to open the menu and move settings around. Sometimes literary slightly moving around towns would crash the game. It is extremely frustrating, game is unplayable in this state.
Due extreme game crashing I’ve started to reduce various graphic settings at various forum’s recommendation together with some other stuff to try to make the game somewhat playable until this is, hopefully, resolved. I have a little helpful gadget on side monitor to check for memory usage and performance system and GPU.
Results are as follows:
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all maxed (ultra settings, frames capped at 144, DLSS set to DLAA) - crashes nearly all the time, almost every menu opening, most teleports, several crashes on game start after crash. Completely unplayable, but frames at stable 144, weirdly enough. Totally memory usage is about 24/32Gb system ram, and GPU vram is about 11200/12282mb. GPU barely hits 71C, processor barely uses 2 performance cores.
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FPS capped to 120, DLSS set to quality – some minor improvement. But still crashes all the time, it’s just slightly better in menus, game still unplayable. FPS stable 120, no change in memory usage.
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Caved and set the settings to high, it dropped textures, shadows and SSAO to 3 out of 4. Doesn’t look bad and it improved the crashing. It still crashes let’s say 20% of the time when teleporting to town, but menu crashes have been significantly reduced and the game seems to be stable outside teleporting and opening maps. FPS still stable at 120, system memory more or less same, and vram dropped do 10GB. GPU not even hitting 70C.
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Anisotropic filtering dropped from 16x to 4x
Further improvement to crashes, now teleporting crashes the game about 10% of the time, and any menu usage seems to be stable. The game is “playable”, but it still crashes very often and that is completely unacceptable.
This is a bad workaround, not a fix. This is a AAA title. I am not vain to say my config is some uber machine and must handle all ultra. I am fine with it being on high, but if that is the requirement, I was hoping that the game would let me know to drop the settings or that I will simply experience FPS drops, not that is will just crash to desktop whenever I try to play.
I also firmly believe that GPU settings themselves aren’t the culprit since the game worked perfectly fine with no issues before Season 2, and it got significantly worse after the patches.
I see that many people report massive loading times and heavy freezes, but not many reported full on game crashes, hence this post.
I would like this to be either resolved or have some functional workaround in settings until it is.
Important note is that no crash since Season 2 ever offered to deliver crash report to Blizzard. It just crashes to desktop in 1-3 secs and that’s it.
If I can provide any more information, let me know.