Having received a early access key to Blizzard’s new game, Diablo IV, we took the time to test it with an RTX 4080 Founders Edition, since the game supports DLSS 3. We’ll be back shortly with a full review of the game on all our graphics cards. In order to enjoy Diablo IV in the best possible conditions, we’ve updated our NVIDIA drivers to version 535.98, which offers the best experience for getting into this new Diabloopus.
Diablo IV is also available as a bundle with the purchase of a desktop PC or an eligible RTX 4090, RTX 4080, RTX 4070 Ti or RTX 4070 GPU.
Let’s get started with driver installation , a quick review of GeForce Experience and our first impressions of the performance of our RTX 4080 Founders Edition in 2160p definition.
Driver update for our RTX 4080 :
As we said in the introduction, we’ve updated the graphics driver on our NVIDIA card to version 535.98 by going directly to the NVIDIA download page. All you have to do is select your graphics card series and then your model. Once you’ve selected your model, simply launch the installation. Don’t forget to install the graphics driver with the GeForce Experience option. GeForce Experience lets you record and share videos, screenshots and livestreams. It will also enable you to keep your drivers up to date and optimize your game settings. Perhaps the only drawback is that you’ll need to create an account in order to use it.
Activating and setting up GeForce Experience :
Once you’ve created an account or logged in, the software will quickly recognize the list of compatible games installed on your PC. Then head to the settings to check the “Enable experimental features” option.
As we can see in the second image, our graphics card and 360Hz screen are perfectly recognized. For these shots, we’ve used our MSI Oculux NXG253R monitor, which benefits from the Reflex Latency Analyzer. Now we need to set up the overlay so that it appears when our game is launched. Of course, since our first tests were carried out in 2160p, we switched to our ROG PG27UQ screen.
Launching your game, in this case Diablo IV, can be done via GeForce Experience, allowing you to let the software set the graphics parameters that best suit your configuration. As you can see above, at the time of capture we hadn’t yet launched the game, but you can see the settings advice given by GeForce Experience.
Graphics settings and DLSS 3 in Diablo IV:
Let’s move on to the graphics settings in Diablo IV. With our RTX 4080 Founders Edition, we opted for 2160p definition and “ultra” graphics quality. We opted for a “performance” DLSS to match NVIDIA’s readings.
Don’t forget that if you have an NVIDIA RTX 40xx graphics card, you’ll also need to enable image generation. Finally, we’ve also chosen to enable NVIDIA Reflex.
Now that we’ve got our game set up, it’s time for the first tests.
RTX 40xx performance under Diablo IV :
As we said in the introduction, we’ve only just begun our Diablo IV adventure with our RTX 4080, and it’s the only card we’ve had a chance to test so far. But don’t worry, we’ll be coming back to it in a more comprehensive test now that we’ve been able to advance in the quest and therefore opt for a scene that will serve as our benchmark. As a reminder, we prefer to use an integrated benchmark when available in the game. Here are the graphics provided by NVIDIA for Diablo IV performance in 1080p, 1440p and 2160p.
For our part, we obtained an average of 73 FPS without DLSS and 162 FPS with DLSS 3 active. Performance varies logically from NVIDIA graphics depending on where the benchmark was carried out. Latency was 24.7 ms without DLSS and 7.7 ms with DLSS 3 and NVIDIA Reflex.
As far as Diablo IV is concerned, having never played the previous versions, we fell under its spell and have already clocked up some ten hours. We’ll be back very soon for a full test with NVIDIA, AMD and Intel cards.
