Diablo 4 beta blocked graphics cards

WTF?! Several people who participated in the Diablo 4 Early Access beta claimed that the game blocked their graphics card, and dozens of user posts on various forums reported that their expensive GPU burned out while playing a Blizzard game. In most cases, the RTX 3080 Ti was affected, most of which came from Gigabyte.

The Diablo 4 Early Access Beta took place over the weekend, and while there were some complaints about bugs and latency, most initial feedback was positive. But judging by a few reports, it seems like a lot of RTX 3080 Ti owners didn’t enjoy the game.

Reddit mail titled “Diablo 4 just broke my 3080 TI”, a user writes that they had been playing the game for 20 minutes when their monitors turned off during a cutscene in the chapel. After rebooting their PC, the motherboard gave error code 97. They write that their Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Vision OC 12G is now dead. Another user said that his same card model was also blocked during this screensaver.

Similar posts appeared on Blizzard’s own forums. Single user claims their RTX 3080 Ti burned out after a few minutes of playing Diablo 4 and the other speaks their fans ran out of steam and the monitors went offline on two separate occasions, killing their 15-month-old card.

One affected player who filed a ticket with Blizzard received a response from the company, citing its Terms of Service, stating that Blizzard is not responsible for any damage to the machine while running the beta version of the game.

There are also reports of EVGA blocking RTX 3080 Ti models. The problem is not limited to this card; RTX 3080 and Radeon RX 6900 XT owners say Diablo 4 destroyed their cards too.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of GPU-killing betas. Amazon New World Beta has blocked several EVGA RTX 3090 cards in 2021. This was initially blamed on the game’s lack of a frame rate limiter, but EVGA later stated that this was due to poor soldering around the card’s MOSFET circuitry. It’s unclear if a similar hardware failure is to blame for the Diablo 4 incidents.

The Diablo 4 Open Beta begins this Friday (March 24) and runs through March 26.