Is StarCraft II Killing Graphics Cards?

An anonymous reader writes "One of the more curious trends emerging from last week's StarCraft II launch is people alleging that the game kills graphics cards.The between-mission scenes onboard Jim Raynor's ship aren't framerate capped. These are fairly static scenes, and don't take much work for the graphics card to display them. Because of this, the card renders the scene as quickly as possible, which then taxes your graphics card as it works to its full potential. As the pipelines within your graphics card work overtime, the card will heat up and if it can't cope with that heat it will crash."

Comments

Re:This is because StarCraft II is correctly writt

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Well I'm less respectful, so you're wrong, and dumb.

As a trivial example, I have 2 monitors. Even when playing a full-screen game, my video card still has an entire other monitor to render. Sure, it's usually not doing much, just 4 gkrellm windows and the clock changing, but the game doesn't know that and has no way of knowing that. I could have 3 monitors, I could be playing a new version of Q-Bert with ultra-mega 3-D graphics on another monitor while cutscenes I don't care about are playing.

Even if it were physically impossible for another program to be running, they'd still be wrong if they render the same scene pixel-for-pixel twice in a row, or if they render a pixel change that happens when the monitor physically can't display it, and that argument can be taken all the way to its inevitable conclusion that they are uselessly hastening the heat death of the universe, which YOU are encouraging you entropy polluting son of a bitch.