Diablo 4 technical review: Laptop and desktop benchmarks

Right now, our gaming benchmarks are performed using these laptops. Click on the images to visit the respective product page. All other test systems (tower PCs, mini-PCs, etc.

) are listed at the end of this article. The action RPG series finally gets a worthy successor roughly 10 years after the launch of Diablo 3 . Whilst the new game could have done more in some areas, Diablo 4 mostly manages to impress in terms of graphics.

The title looks decent once it reaches medium settings, and delivers great to excellent visuals at high settings and above. Besides visual effects (e. g.

magic spells) and weather and time-of-day simulation, the detail level of characters and texture sharpness in environments are exceptional as well. The game also features superb animations and destructible level objects. Overall, Diablo 4 offers highly atmospheric (grim) environments that invite gamers to slay some monsters.

The neat and well-structured graphics menu is going to satisfy most gamers (though it requires quite a bit of scrolling). Whilst the upper section mainly contains screen settings (there is unfortunately no “normal” fullscreen mode), various options such as resolution scaling and frame rate limit (max. 400) await you in the middle.

Depending on your graphics card, you can also enable XeSS (Intel), FSR (AMD) or DLSS (Nvidia) in this section. Diablo 4 lets you use DLSS in combination with Frame Generation, but you’ll need an RTX 40 Series card or better to do so. Rounding off the graphics menu is a quality section that offers four convenient presets and around 20 detail settings.

The developers opted to explain each setting in words rather than including images for comparison. On the bright side, the game deserves a thumbs-up for not requiring you to restart the game after changing any of the settings. Other than some minor graphical glitches and clipping issues, Diablo 4 cuts a surprisingly good and polished figure technically.

If you ignore the login process, the game launches and loads pleasantly fast (especially considering the intro videos can be skipped) and doesn’t have any other major problems. The only downside is that its install size is relatively large at over 80 GB. Since Blizzard didn’t include a built-in benchmark in the game, we used a sequence defined by us to measure frame rates.

A rather slow-paced section of the game was selected for better reproducibility; it doesn’t represent a worst-case scenario. As you can see in the video below, we move the player character along a set path for about 20 seconds. CapFrameX was used to record frame rates.

Because Diablo 4 employs a bird’s eye view, an average of 30 fps should be enough for the game to be considered decently playable. Diablo 4 has moderate hardware requirements. Even an iGPU such as the popular Iris Xe Graphics G7 is capable of running the game at 1080p, albeit only at low settings.

By contrast, the much more powerful Radeon 680M managed to churn out approx. 30 fps at Full HD even with the settings maxed out. You likewise don’t need a high-end system to play the Diablo 4 at QHD.

Even a GeForce RTX 4050 appears underutilised when running the game at 1440p and Ultra preset. The situation looks similar at 4K. That said, anything below an RTX 4050 may struggle to perform well at this resolution as soon as you go for max settings.

Refer to the table below for benchmark results, including those obtained with DLSS and Frame Generation enabled. Because gaming tests are very time-consuming and are often constrained by installation or activation limits, we are only able to provide you with part of the benchmark results at the time of publishing this article. We will be adding more graphics cards over the coming days and weeks.

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