A couple of years ago, Amazon Games caught a lot of flack for the New World beta, which seemingly had a bug that could kill certain graphics cards. Now, Blizzard might be facing a similar problem with the Diablo 4 beta.
According to a small number of user reports, the Diablo 4 beta has caused a few RTX 3080 Ti-equipped PCs and in some cases, it has been reported that GPUs were bricked. Given the seriousness of this issue, Blizzard has already issued a public statement (via PCGamer), saying that it is “working closely with Nvidia to identify affected hardware configurations and gather as many data points as possible to assist the investigation”.
The user reports appeared on the Battle.net forums and Reddit. Back when players were facing a similar issue with Amazon's New World, it wasn't necessarily the game at fault, but it did expose a weakness with the design of certain graphics cards. We could be looking at a similar case here with Diablo 4, which would explain why only a small number of users are being affected. With New World, it was primarily EVGA graphics cards that were impacted, with Diablo 4, it seems a set of Gigabyte graphics cards are having issues.
In the meantime, if you'd like to play the Diablo 4 beta and minimise this issue, then you can set a frame rate limit within the Nvidia control panel. This should lessen the load on your GPU while playing the game and may help to avoid hardware failures.
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KitGuru Says: Given the limited number of reports, it may take a while to discover the root cause behind this issue. Hopefully we'll get an update on this situation after the open beta this weekend.