Diablo 4’s frustrating hitches and stutters should be fixed soon

Diablo 4 is a game I can – and do – play for hours at a time. It’s very easy to sink into that zen state as you’re farming for gear, grinding XP, and bursting floods of demons like they’re juicy, blood-filled candy. Unfortunately, if you enjoy a longer Diablo 4 session, you might find that the RPG game begins to struggle the more time you keep playing. Fortunately, Blizzard says that a fix for this annoying issue is on the way, and it should arrive before the Diablo 4 season 1 start date.

This Diablo 4 memory leak problem is something you might not have actually realized was at fault, but many players running the game on pretty powerful rigs are finding that their game still struggles performance-wise. This can happen even soon after you boot the game up, but often becomes especially noticeable as play sessions go on.

It’s bad enough that I’ve cranked my textures down to medium and lowered several of my Diablo 4 settings despite being on a modern setup with 32GB of RAM and an RTX 3080, one of the best graphics cards for gaming. I can typically run the game at higher settings, but if I do it’ll start to chug or hitch up every so often – not something you want to deal with when plowing through the game’s harder dungeons, where a lost moment can be fatal.

Fortunately, it seems a fix is coming. Diablo community manager Adam ‘PezRadar’ Fletcher responds to a query about whether any progress has been made on the PC performance problems. “This one’s been tricky,” Fletcher says, “But some good news: we believe we have something for the update on July 18.”

That July 18 Diablo 4 update is set to be the big balance patch prior to Diablo 4’s Season of the Malignant, which the team described as “even chonkier” than the last major set of class balance changes in Diablo 4 patch 1.0.3. So if this fix is indeed the resolution we’ve been hoping for, you’ll be able to experience season one in all its gruesome visual spectacle.

Fletcher also confirms via Twitter that Diablo 3’s ‘Rebirth’ feature, which lets you take one of your existing characters and strip away all their gear and levels to use them in a new season, isn’t currently part of Diablo 4. However, he notes that “we’ve heard this a bunch so the team is aware.” It’s more a minor convenience than anything else, but it’d be a nice bonus to have.

With the first Diablo 4 battle pass launching alongside the start of season one, we’ve explained everything you’ll want to know ahead of time. You’ll also want to make sure you’re up to speed on the best Diablo 4 builds so that you can get ahead of the game when the new season begins.