It seems that the web forum has been lit up recently because of a surge in crashes when I played Diablo4 on an Nvidia RTX4 series graphics card. It turns out that the problem is caused by Nvidia's frame generation technology.

Adam Fletcher, all things Diablo-related at Blizzard, the company that publishes the Diablo series, explained thusly at X:

"I saw some posts about the crashes I'm experiencing after the start of the season. If you have a 40 series NVIDIA card, we recommend disabling frame generation for the time being. The team is looking into it at NVIDIA, but this seems to be a major cause of some of these crashes.

The X thread below Fletcher's post suggests that disabling frame generation can actually help reduce the frequency of crashes. "Thanks, it solved the crash problem and it crashed almost 20 times today," one X user said, while another observed, "I had a crash every time I logged in or zoned off frame generation, disabled and stopped completely."

Confusingly, not everyone who has an RTX40 board seems to be crashing. "Here is the latest driver 4070, as long as I can say there is no problem. Everything reaches the limit, 1440p w/DLSS quality and frame generation on. I played for about 6 hours," the x user said. "I have a 14700 series with 32k and 6000gb ddr5 30mhz RAM, but it often crashes in games without problem settings," says Diablo4 gamers.

Frame generation, of course, is still possible using various AI acceleration algorithms. It is an Nvidia rendering technology that creates entirely new frames and inserts them between frames rendered entirely by the GPU's 3D pipeline.

Frame gen increases the overall frame rate and visual smoothness. However, since the frames are generated using predictions based on previous frames, these frames do not reflect user input, so latency cannot be reduced in the same way as frames rendered in a fully 3D pipeline. On Nvidia Gpus, frame gen is limited to the latest RTX4070 series graphics cards, such as RTX4080Super and RTX40 .

AMD has its own frame generation technology and, as with AMD, is available on a wider range of current and legacy GPUs.

There is still no mention of when Blizzard and Nvidia will make the fix.