Pity the poor souls of the Nvidia RTX 3080 Tis lost to its latest threat.
No, I’m not talking about crypto mining, I’m talking about Lilith, Lord of Hatred, the antagonist of the new Diablo IV Beta, one that apparently wreaks havoc on the beleaguered graphics card.
According to a new report from our friends at PC gamer (opens in new tab), some players playing the new beta version of the upcoming action RPG are experiencing some major graphical errors such as black screens and fans accelerating at full speed. In the worst case, this can even lead to a completely broken GPU.
It apparently affects Gigabyte versions of the RTX 3080 Ti, although this has not yet been confirmed. If it’s anything like the problem with the Nvidia RTX 3090 and Amazon Studios’ New world a few years ago, the game may reveal a technical flaw that other games may not have.
In the case of the RTX 3090 and New world, the problem was poor soldering on a batch of EVGA RTX 3090 cards that failed at very high fps. We don’t know if this is the cause of the problems reported here or how widespread it is, but at least there is something you can do to at least protect yourself against this kind of problem.
We’ve reached out to Gigabyte for comment and will update this story if and when we hear back.
How to limit your frame rate to protect your GPU
If there is a frame rate issue that causes Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti glitches, an easy way to help prevent this is to limit the number of frames the GPU can output to a reasonable level.
For the most part, modern GPUs can go much faster than even the best gaming monitors can handle, so it’s always good to limit your FPS to your monitor’s refresh rate. Anything higher is generally wasted frames anyway, so limiting your FPS to what your monitor can support won’t really affect your gaming performance.
- Right click on your desktop and select Show more options (Windows 11 only)
- Select Nvidia Control Panel
- Select Manage 3D Settings
- Scroll down and select Max Frame Rate to change the setting from the drop-down menu
- Set what you want the maximum frame rate to be, but setting it to your monitor’s refresh rate is the safest bet, then click OK
That should do the trick. You can set the framerate limit as application-specific or global, but in general you’re fine with making this your global setting so you never overload your GPU.
