Digital Foundry - Diablo 4 PC Tech Review

[Remij 4,680]

 

[Twinblade★ 3,922]

Unfortunately the game does have a VRAM usage issue like many other ports. I get moments of random slowdowns and also annoying stuttering.

 
But funnily enough I was having less technical issues when playing it on my Ally 

[Remij 4,680]

2 minutes ago, Twinblade said:

Unfortunately the game does have a VRAM usage issue like many other ports. I get moments of random slowdowns and also annoying stuttering.

 
But funnily enough I was having less technical issues when playing it on my Ally 

I watched the video and every instance of the "vram stuttering" that he showed looked more like server related lag issues than anything else.  Were you gaming at 4K?

[Twinblade★ 3,922]

Just now, Remij said:

I watched the video and every instance of the "vram stuttering" that he showed looked more like server related lag issues than anything else.  Were you gaming at 4K?

 
Nah, I get the lag occasionally as well but i can differentiate between that and my VRAM being maxed out

[Remij 4,680]

4 minutes ago, Twinblade said:

 
Nah, I get the lag occasionally as well but i can differentiate between that and my VRAM being maxed out

Damn.  lol this game shouldn't need 16GB of VRAM to work properly  

[Cooke 2,029]

It's great on my PC but on steam deck it starts off fine then after 45 minutes or so the frame rates start to drop and gets slow as fuck and I have to reboot the game 

[Twinblade★ 3,922]

So to sum up, unless you have a 16gb card you pretty much have to turn textures down to high to avoid VRAM issues….and at that setting the textures will be worse than on PS5  

[Cooke 2,029]

1 minute ago, Twinblade said:

So to sum up, unless you have a 16gb card you pretty much have to turn textures down to high to avoid VRAM issues….and at that setting the textures will be worse than on PS5  

I've had no framerate issues with everything maxxed at 1080p 

[Remij 4,680]

1 hour ago, Twinblade said:

So to sum up, unless you have a 16gb card you pretty much have to turn textures down to high to avoid VRAM issues….and at that setting the textures will be worse than on PS5  

Well, it's important to note that the console versions are not running anywhere close to native 4K.  So running at native 4K and with ultra textures is quite a bit more demanding in every sense than what the consoles are doing.

 

I mean, there's obvious reasons why PC games DO require more memory to be equivalent to console settings in a lot of games these days.  You have games developed with console architecture in mind from the start, like the PS exclusives.  PC memory setup is different with split memory pools, and those games were never designed to work in that way so it's a lot of work to go in and change it all to optimize it for PC.. which is why you see so many games these days just allocate a shit ton more memory than they really need.  They basically (lazily) just load all possible textures into memory to not have to deal with it.  So then you get problems like TLOU P1 had where if you didn't have enough VRAM, it wasn't just some textures that looked worse, or slight overall reduction of texture quality... it was just pure garbage across the board and they'd never load in because it was designed that if it couldn't load all the textures into memory, it just didn't load any high quality textures lol.  They've vastly improved it since launch and now it's how you would expect for the most part.  Then there's the fact that DX12 and Vulkan require developers to very specifically manage memory in a way that they never had to worry about before on PC... and the way Windows pages data in and out of memory is less efficient that the consoles with their APIs that directly handles it all.

 

So there's very obvious reasons why this is happening.. it's not all because "games just require more memory".

[Hot Sauce 2,732]

2 hours ago, Twinblade said:

So to sum up, unless you have a 16gb card you pretty much have to turn textures down to high to avoid VRAM issues….and at that setting the textures will be worse than on PS5  

 

1440p ultra on a 12GB 3080 with no issues.

[Twinblade★ 3,922]

50 minutes ago, Hot Sauce said:

 

1440p ultra on a 12GB 3080 with no issues.

 
I guess I should have specified >8gb cards.

[The Mother Fucker 26]

On 2023-06-16 at 11:06 AM, Cooke said:

I've had no framerate issues with everything maxxed at 1080p 

I think 12GB should be sufficient at 1080p for this game, I don't expect no pixel texture loss would occur with that card, unlike the 8GB GPUs.

 

I did some tests playing this game with 8GB VRAM on some older GPUs running this game at 1080p max where I saw a lot of problems.   The game will crash out on my RTX 2080 + R9 5900X rig, kick you to the desktop with not enough memory error and ask I lower settings.  So I switched to my eldest rig, RX 5700 XT AE + R7 3700X rig , and was amazed to see that Team Red's 2019 GPU can run Diablo IV maxed out stable than my old Turing card.

 

I think it might be due to the lack of Resizable Bar support that reworked the ability for games to move data from VRAM to CPU, instead of data from VRAM to RAM to CPU put a real limitation on how these old NVIDIA cards would handle games when going over its VRAM buffer.  Plus the 2080 using old PCIe Gen 3.0 x16 bandwidth while my 5700 XT has Resizable Bar and PCIe Gen 4.0. 

[Substatic 421]

Works perfect for me 4k/120 ultra. 

[Twinblade★ 3,922]

This game bummed me out. It was fun for a bit but it gets old so fast. Once FFXVI and Rain Code dropped i've had no incentive to go back and continue playing it.