Diablo III - graphics lag...? EDIT: some solutions

[Worba]

So I did the 1 year promotional and got Diablo 3 free. Finally got around to installing and running it and... graphics are incredibly laggy. And the cinematic hangs and hiccups so much it's barely watchable.

Has anyone else had this experience? All I can say so far is that I'm quite glad not to have paid for this.

BTW I have an NVIDIA GeForce 260M GTX which is listed as being within recommended settings for this game, and I can play wow on "good" video levels with zero lag, and "very good" with virtually none - so this isn't a case of insufficient system resources...

[cowmuflage]

Nope it's run perfectly fine for me :/

[Vephriel]

Hrm, I can't say I've encountered any issues with Diablo. I run it on full max settings but haven't experienced any lag except for a few internet hiccups nearer to release before the servers were stabilized. Cinematics run smoothly for me, I've gone back and rewatched them a few times as well without problems.

[Worba]

From what I've been able to find it looks like this is due to a bug in patch 1.02, which affects some users but not others; seems like 1.02 caused the game to become incompatible or less-compatible with certain video drivers / hardware configs / etc.

Here's a 26+ page thread on the subject for anyone else experiencing similar problems:

https://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic ... 171?page=1

I did find a blue comment last night basically acknowledging the problem and saying they're working on it, but with no ETA.

So... yeah. Hope they can fix this soon.

[cowmuflage]

From what I've been able to find it looks like this is due to a bug in patch 1.02, which affects some users but not others; seems like 1.02 caused the game to become incompatible or less-compatible with certain video drivers / hardware configs / etc.

Here's a 26+ page thread on the subject for anyone else experiencing similar problems:

https://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic ... 171?page=1

I did find a blue comment last night basically acknowledging the problem and saying they're working on it, but with no ETA.

So... yeah. Hope they can fix this soon.

They'll fix it :3

[Worba]

Hopefully you are right - I have managed to get it working somewhat after some settings tweaks - e.g. I can move around and fight with virtually no lag, and cinematics... well they sometimes work now, that's progress!

But I should be able to run it on higher settings, so we'll see what they can do.

[Meggers]

Aw, that sucks. I don't read the diablo forums as much so i didn't know of this one! I do know that holy hell I get actual awful latency a lot and it annoys the piss out of me. ;-;

[Worba]

I've finally got my game to run pretty smoothly. A couple things I've found to help through trial and error, for those with lag:

1) If your game's default screen size is smaller than your actual monitor, switch to windowed mode - don't sacrifice effects, shadows, ground clutter or anything else below default levels if not absolutely necessary. One of the things I really like about D3 is how beautiful the graphics are.

2) Generally my game will be a bit laggy for the first couple minutes, and then smooth out - my guess is that it's still loading data (patch is done so it's not that). After that the only lag I get is occasionally a brief catch when entering a new area, e.g. probably busy loading data for the new encounter (this also happens to me in wow on a similar frequency, so I'm used to it).

[Worba]

3) I'd had the foreground FPS at 60, but just for kicks I tried pushing it all the way over to 200 - and it largely eliminated my remaining lag, strangely enough.

[Worba]

Another problem I'd sometimes experience, is when switching from background to foreground mode my FPS would suddenly lurch to a virtual halt - I suspect this may have been triggered by differences in max foreground / background FPS caps, so I switched my background FPS limit to 200 as well, and haven't since encountered the issue. Not sure if that fixed it or if it's just me being lucky, but so far so good...

[Worba]

Well the last change didn't seem to have (lasting) benefits, so I've been playing around with max FPS a bit more - 60 FPS is what I normally average when playing wow, so I moved it down in that neighborhood, and ended up at 58, which seemed to improve things, but then after I started running Skype it got a bit "stuttery" again, so I tweaked it down to 55, which seems workable at least for now.