If you have an RTX 3080 Ti, you may want to be careful.

PC Gamer yesterday reported on an issue impacting those with Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards trying to run the now open Diablo 4 beta. Beginning last weekend with the closed beta, owners of the RTX 3080 Ti have taken to the Blizzard forums and Reddit to report that Diablo 4 killed their graphics cards.

According to what users are reporting, at a random point when playing the Diablo 4 beta, their monitors will go black, the fans on the GPU will run at full speed, and their system restarts. Some users will sometimes see a motherboard error code when attempting to restart and their GPU is effectively dead.

If this sounds familiar, you may be thinking back to the issues RTX 3090 owners encountered in Amazon's MMO New World. The issue with New World came down to a manufacturing defect in RTX 3090 hardware, specifically with how the MOSFETs were soldered onto the boards. The issue only really came to light in scenarios where the cards ran with uncapped framerates in scenarios that could allow the card to run at extremely high framerates (such as a main menu or static loading screen). Without this manufacturing defect on the cards, uncapped framerates aren't typically an issue, nor is running a GPU at 100% load.

Though currently unconfirmed, it is possible that this issue with the RTX 3080 Ti cards is another one of these previously undiscovered manufacturing defects. It also seems to mainly impact graphics cards manufactured by Gigabyte, but I have seen some reports from those with EVGA RTX 3080 Ti cards. For now, do not assume that you're "safe" simply because you haven't seen reports specific to your card's manufacturer.

PC Gamer offers up at least one thing RTX 3080 Ti owners can, and should, do in order to reduce the chances of the Diablo 4 beta killing your GPU. They suggest limiting your maximum framerate through the Nvidia Control Panel and not rely on any in-game framerate cap. This is merely a suggestion from PC Gamer and may not fully protect you given that the exact cause of this issue is not yet known.

I would like to add a bit to PC Gamer's suggestion above. In my experience, you should limit your max framerate in Nvidia Control Panel before you start the game. You can also, optionally, set a max framerate on a per program or per game basis if you do not wish to set a global limit. You will also probably not have to restart your PC if all you're doing is implementing a framerate cap in the control panel.

Blizzard took to their forums to suggest a couple of troubleshooting steps if you find your card no longer working after playing the Diablo 4 beta.

Blizzard says that they are working with Nvidia to identify the cause of this issue.

If you are not worried about the beta possibly killing your video card, the open beta for Diablo 4 is live for the weekend. Blizzard warns you that they are expecting "unprecedented traffic and queue times." So, good luck getting in!