Diablo® III

Operating System - Windows XP SP 3
Video Card Model - 9800 GTX+
Driver Version - 296.10
Max Video Card Temperature - 70 max but mostly in the mid 60's

I can play from 30 mins to multiple hours before my screen randomly turns black permanently. Sometimes the sound repeats, other times I can't hear anything but my computer fans which seem to kick up to 100% speed after the crash. The power light on my moniter goes from green to yellow. No harddrive activity or anything, computer basically dies. I have to hold in the power button on the tower to shut it off. This only happens in Diablo 3, I can play other hardware intensive games for hours on end with no issues.

This crash is really sucking the will out of me to even log on. It is getting extremely annoying not making progress in the game since I have to reclear maps just to find out where the next checkpoint/waypoint is.

I can tell u I'm having the EXACT same issue with my HD6670...black screen... have to force restart of comp.
Win7 64bit
AMD X3 @3.4Ghz
8gigs. mem
HD6670

REALLY frustrating, cause EVERY other game I have plays wonderful. Tried lowering the details, limiting fps, etc.,etc.,etc.
The thing that leads be to believe it's not on my end is that it happens so sporadic. I've noticed that it happens more when I level, enter dungeons, or kill mini-bosses and loot drops.
Sometimes the screen will blackout...then return after 30sec or so, then other times.... nothing... and I'm forced to reboot.

For a game "10 years in the making.." , sure leaves alot to be desired in terms of play-ability.

Wishing I hadn't signed up for that year crap now....

Operating System - Windows 7 64-bits portuguese
Video Card Model - GTS 250
Driver Version - 296.10 driver
Max Video Card Temperature - runs from 57 up to 59Cº
Processor - Core 2 Duo 2,66GHz running from 51-54Cº
Connection - cable broadband (not wifi, nor router) direct connected to the modem 20mbps

I've tried limiting the FPS, windowed mode, without V-Synd, without shadows, low FX, low resolution and so on lowering every single sound and video configuration of the game and it still randomly freezing, showing me a black screen for 3-30 seconds then returning to the game.

Friends with better and worst computers are running smoothly and saying that my character just stop from time to time (when this driver crashes occur).

I've a ticket open since 16/may and no solution so far.

I'm SHOCKED that after all the time developing and running BETA Blizzard and Nvidia still havent found a solution.

I just hope you find a solution fast since it's a game we've bought and we Blizzard demand us to play online.

I'm looking forward for a solution.

There is another work around you can try, the desktop here was/has been doing something very simular to this for while, but only when a game is running in TRUE FULLSCREEN mode, running the game in windowed mode (any type, be it fullscreen windowed or normal windowed) appears to fix the issue.

I do not know if it will help any of you but it worked here and have not had an issue since.

windowed mode doesn't help so far i've tried:

windowed mode
all options/settings turned off and down
disabled my anti-virus
made sure secondary logon was started and enabled
checked temperatures
did a memory check
scanned for bad sectors
defragged my hard drive
tried 3 different nvidia drivers (last, latest, and newest beta)

i even formatted my computer, reinstalled windows 7, and only diablo 3... nothing else was on my computer at all and it still occurs

this doesn't seem to be an issue that we can fix on our side... what makes this extremely frustrating for me is the fact i could play the beta for hours and hours without a single problem... now i cant play after the game has launched for more than 30 minutes

Same thing here... The problem only happens with Diablo 3. It's not an overheating problem. The temperature of the GPU (GTX 280) is 68 ºC...

Same - or almost - thing here. After 10-15 minutes of play, graphics corrupt briefly and monitor looses signal.

Same problem here and overheating is NOT the problem. It did that when I was killing the skelleton king for the first time with my barb, and since the only way out was to restart the whole computer (alt+tab was not working, nor did any of the other tricks to switch back to the desktop) so I didn't get any items for killing him. So I missed all my yellows, and will have to start a new barb to get them.

Please fix this Blizz, I have had this problem since the beta, and you never did anything then, not even reply to my threads. It's getting annoying to the point that I played Torchlight yesterday all day...

Operating System:
Windows 2.6.1.7601 (Service Pack 1)
CPU Type:
Intel® Core™ i3 CPU 550 @ 3.20GHz
CPU Speed:
3.22 GHz
System Memory:
3.87 GB
Video Card Model:
ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series
Video Card Memory:
2.67 GB
Video Card Driver:
aticfx32.dll
Desktop Resolution:
1920x1200
Hard Disk Size:
931.41 GB
Hard Disk Free Space:
788.46 GB (85%)
Download Speed:
975.69 kB/s (8 mbps)

My wife's computer has two ATI 5750's crossfire, we ran Diablo 3 fine for a few days then all of a sudden I believe after she got prompted for a driver update it now has issues with the game. It will start artifacting bad and the screen will go all black and then come back off and on.So far I tried uninstalling the drivers, running driver sweeper and then rolling back to install 12.2 BUT every time I try to install different drivers the stupid Command Center says its still on driver 12.3, even if I try to go down to 12.2 or up to 12.4. I dont get it.Any ideas? Anyone else having any similar problems? At this point we can get it to be playable

05/20/2012 11:14 AMPosted by MrH

Any news? This should be your top priority if it's not.

True! Look how many people have the same problem...

Blizzard is disappointing =( ...

I had this problem, because I was running overdrive mode on my gfx card. Disable it through your video card control centre and let Diablo manage your video card.. that worked for me.

Windows 7
Radeon 5700 series

windowed mode doesn't help so far i've tried:

windowed mode
all options/settings turned off and down
disabled my anti-virus
made sure secondary logon was started and enabled
checked temperatures
did a memory check
scanned for bad sectors
defragged my hard drive
tried 3 different nvidia drivers (last, latest, and newest beta)

i even formatted my computer, reinstalled windows 7, and only diablo 3... nothing else was on my computer at all and it still occurs

this doesn't seem to be an issue that we can fix on our side... what makes this extremely frustrating for me is the fact i could play the beta for hours and hours without a single problem... now i cant play after the game has launched for more than 30 minutes

Ouch man lol, that is a lot of stuff you did for this. I tried some things here and there but that's brutal. I'm not trying anything more because sooooo many people have this problem.

05/20/2012 10:11 AMPosted by Draziell

Same thing here... The problem only happens with Diablo 3. It's not an overheating problem. The temperature of the GPU (GTX 280) is 68 ºC...

I think you need to realize that everyone graphic card works differently. I believe most graphic cards can run at 150 but if you have other crap causing heat that adds up and yes 68 C is around 154 F which IMO is to hot for most graphic cards. It needs to really stay around no more then 140. I myself have this problem but my card just hard locks and then after a while it will go to a black screen. I always have to hard boot the computer as the whole system is locked up. The problem that we are all having is game releated though. I am finding my temps on most of my games stay in the 120's F range and that is for the hard core graphic games. Softcore stuff and just normal use of my grahic card is showing at 110 F range. I have a 295 GTX Geforce. I think this game does hog a lot of crap from video cards however, I think each person could have different fixes to their problem. I would suggest to most people to check underclock their card a bit. Remove a side of your tower and put a external fan on it. Increase your fan speed on your graphic card and turn down the settings of D3 until they can find a way to fix their software from pulling so much from the card. I have all my card settings turn down from outside the game but for some reason the game itself seems to be overiding this.

a workaround untill this is fixed , to avoid high temps you must 'tweak' the game via vsynch on and set max foreground fps..

it can vary per day what result you get i've ran at 61-64C for a few days with it set to 31 fps (gave me 30-31 fps in game, and a really low cpu load compared to other settings) today it seems it moved to 33 fps to get that same 'sweetspot' (also 30-31fps ingame atm for me)

to get BEST tweak results:
have taskmanager open look at CPU load (total or for D3 alone)
have a temp monitor program running like asus smartdoctor or RealTemp (set it to monitor gpu temp) or whatever tool you got with the vidcard - or use the one thats linked by the blue.
(i show these on my 2nd screen to monitor them constantly)

now go down with the setting max fps foreground till you see your CPU load drop a mile
for me when idle on a quiet spot with no action.. not in a town btw i get either 0-5% cpu load on some days and on others 10-20% max.. and vidcard temp drops a mile aswell

on other settings you'll see more fluctuating CPU loads and reach higher % (up to 50% for D3 alone) also your ingame fps will vary alot more ..f.i. jump from 32-60 really rapid almost too rapid for the eye to catch.
on these other settings (up to 61) my card reaches 71-75C sometimes more , with no fps max set it gets over 81C rapidly (in seconds)
mind this is all when standing still , doing nothing in a quiet spot.. not near vendors either. i've not had any crashes at those temps but i just find em way too high for my taste and also frown at the cpu-load

intel core2 duo E8400 (stock speeds), Asus EN9800gtx+ dark knight (with heatpipe cooling and fan) 2 casefans .. all fans blowing at MAX speed manually set. (except cpu-fan, thats on auto) 2 gig kingston hyperX ddr2-800 (pc3200), running the game from a OCZ vertex2 SSD drive. OS: Win XP pro 32bit, sp3. vidcard driver is not updated in a while.. 6.14.12.8558 (i wont update it till i see its a specific fix for D3) pc was totally cleaned a week ago. room temp 18-20C

hope this helps you guys tweak and find a nice COOL setting for yourselves aswell.. remember to look at it every day it can change a bit since they're already working on making it better it seems ;)

even at 30-31 fps the game runs super smooth for me not even a glitch at this setting either.

I bet you wont have to down clock your vidcard at all when you found the 'sweetspot'

GL tweaking ;)

On my wifes computer tried disabling Overdrive mode then Turning on VSync and setting the max foreground fps to 40 and so far its been running a lot smoother and no black screen.

I had this problem a lot.. in a few games (everything stops for 2 seconds, the screen goes out, 5-10 seconds later it comes back up). Mainly the Witcher, Divinity 2, and now Diablo 3, I can verify so far that it was my card overheating for Diablo 3 and Divinity 2 (have not tried Witcher yet) . I took an air compressor hose to my PC and tried to carefully clean out the dust, mainly on my video card and now it happens much much less to none. I used to smoke cigarettes while playing and you would not believe the crap that builds up in the PC of a smoker.

I tested my temp with nvidia inspector and it confirmed 20c less while running heavy. (it was idling at like 65c now it idles at about 45c)

This will not help you all but i hope it helps some.

If you glimpse the error "The display driver has stopped working" when it goes to desktop this may help.

Nvidia 250 GTS

EDIT: well from fresh boot and not running a game it idles near 45c.. right now it is close to 55c (sorta warm outside today). But i get a freeze-up about 1 time a day instead of every 5-10 mins now after just cleaning it.

EDIT post limit but i think this holds value.
I have a thought. I am thinking.. is it our video cards overheating or the physics part of the card.. this game has a ton of rag-doll stuff (one time i nailed a enemy and it came up to the "Camera" and literally was thrown through and behind me.. if i had nvidia 3d going it would have looked sweeeeet!) but i see a lot of black screens on the 250 GTS and i wonder if that card just has a lesser physics chip or something of the sort... food for thought.

I think we realize this game does not like high temperatures and we just need do keep our cards icy so it will not freeze up though.. but i hated HATED when The Witcher was giving me issues and i am hoping my cleaning will let me run it more than 15 mins.

hope it gets working for you.

05/20/2012 01:03 PMPosted by AllStarr

Same thing here... The problem only happens with Diablo 3. It's not an overheating problem. The temperature of the GPU (GTX 280) is 68 ºC...

I think you need to realize that everyone graphic card works differently. I believe most graphic cards can run at 150 but if you have other crap causing heat that adds up and yes 68 C is around 154 F which IMO is to hot for most graphic cards. It needs to really stay around no more then 140. I myself have this problem but my card just hard locks and then after a while it will go to a black screen. I always have to hard boot the computer as the whole system is locked up. The problem that we are all having is game releated though. I am finding my temps on most of my games stay in the 120's F range and that is for the hard core graphic games. Softcore stuff and just normal use of my grahic card is showing at 110 F range. I have a 295 GTX Geforce. I think this game does hog a lot of crap from video cards however, I think each person could have different fixes to their problem. I would suggest to most people to check underclock their card a bit. Remove a side of your tower and put a external fan on it. Increase your fan speed on your graphic card and turn down the settings of D3 until they can find a way to fix their software from pulling so much from the card. I have all my card settings turn down from outside the game but for some reason the game itself seems to be overiding this.

Yes, I know that graphic cards works differently... But when I'm playing a game like Crysis 2 or Skyrim, the temperature goes to 80ºC and I have no problem AT ALL!
I alredy tried to increse the fan speed, low the graphic setting, low the max fps, and nothing works.

And since it is a LOT o people having the same issue, it can't be a problem in our hardware/so. There's too many people having the same problem... Too much...

If I crank the fan on the card it gets down to 40c. Occasionally I'll still get the black screen.

running a GTS 250 OC had to set resolution to 800x600 and im still running 70 degrees at 73 degrees it black screens. 65 degrees at idle. other like games like masseffect3 and wow i hit the mid 80s and no issues and they are running at 1920x1080 mid to max effects and im using two monitors and it says at black screen 296.10 nvida driver kernel mode stops responding