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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."
How about timedemos for FPS games? Benchmarking your card? Tools used for overclocking to actually stress the card? These GPU's are designed to operate at max temp. Many games operate with no FPS cap unless vsync is enabled. This is a complete non-issue.
This sounds more like a design issue with the cards than an issue with StarCraft 2. If the card can not handle performing at its full potential, then the card was under-engineered in the first place.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Yes, they do. It is quite standard practice for games to render uncapped. This story is just FUD and troll. I would've expected it to come from kdawson, but apparently I gave Taco too much credit.
To clarify my stance: This story is retarded, and all the time you look at it/think about it is time you won't get back.
Bullshit.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Only lazy firmware developers for hardware can do that, the fault is not any game, its the driver (or, if the program somehow turns of the fan)
Graphics card that can't handle working to its full potential is already dead (as designed).
Story title should read: "Faulty video cards with inadequate cooling are freeze when run at their full potential". This has nothing to do with starcraft 2, other than that it's a video game that runs on a video card.
Sounds like a design defect in the card, not the game.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
Its hardly "Starcraft II Killing Graphics Cards", its "Shitty Graphics Cards Dying Because Of Lack Of Self Moderation When Running At Full Speed". But I guess the second version doesn't include a much hyped game in the title...
That's the whole point of the article.
OMG NEW HIGHLY ANTICIPATED TITLE KILLZ0RZ YOUR COMPUTAR!!!
No, if your machine is crappy, this exposes that you've got cooling or power problems, or both. You should see that you fix these.
In '94 I had a 486SX-25 that would choke and die when playing Doom in multi-player from time to time. It wasn't that the game KILLZ0RED MY COMPUTAR, it was that the CPU couldn't keep up with everything. Sticking a DX2-50 Overdrive into the socket solved that problem.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I fail to see how rendering a scene at a high framerate would be any more challenging than rendering a complex scene at a lower frame rate. Remember that the hardware either is or is not in use. The ROPs, the shaders, etc. It isn't like there is some magic thing about a simple scene that makes a card work extra hard or something.
So my bet is you have users that have one or more things happening:
1) They are overclocking their cards. This is always a potential for problems. When you push something past its spec, you may find it has problem in some cases.
2) Their airflow sucks. They have inadequate ventilation in their case for their card.
3) Their PSU is inadequate for their card. High end graphics cards need a lot of voltage on the 12v rail. If you have one that can't handle it, well then maybe you have some problems in intense games.
Really, this sounds no different than the people who OC their processor and claim it is "perfectly stable" but then claim that Prime95 or LinX "break it." No, that means it is NOT perfectly stable, that means you have a problem. Doesn't mean the problem manifests with everything, but it means that you do have a problem that'll show up sometimes.
I'm betting it is the same thing here. It isn't that SC2 is "killing" their card, it is that their card has problem and SC2 is one of the things that can reveal that. There are probably others too.
So if your system is crashing in SC2 disable any overclocking, make sure you've got good ventilation (which may mean a new case) and make sure you have a PSU that supports your graphics card, including providing dedicate PCIe power connectors sufficient for it. Don't blame the software for revealing a flaw in your system.
If a process, like a webserver, could erase itself from a hard drive by benign input, it would be a bug. This is no different.
My graphics card, a GTX 275, was factory locked to a 40% duty cycle on the fan, no matter how hot it got. I had to resort to RivaTuner to make the fan auto-adjust speed based on temperature. Since there is no speed limit where I'm putting people's lives at risk for rendering too many frames per second, or any other reasonable reason to limit the amount of work a card can do before it destroys itself when the hardware is perfectly capable of doing that work without destroying itself, the only conclusion is that it is defective.
That said, anything that doesn't use vsync is stupid, period, always, (unless you're benchmarking or trying to warm a cold room). Spending that extra processing power on a proper motion blur would have a far greater effect on perceived smoothness.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
I'm going to have to disagree here. It's not up to software developers to go around making sure hardware x and y won't just roll over and die during certain sections of their game.
It's up to hardware manufacturers to make sure their hardware works under all normal conditions. I mean really, if you make hardware that can fry itself, maybe you're pushing it to far.
Gee whiz guys! We can render this game at 4839483 FPS! But don't do it for more than 2 seconds or it'll melt! Woot, time to release them en masse! The benchmarks will look awesome!
Pushing a card to its max should _never_ cause it to "crash", let alone get damaged.
At this point I suspect "Kdawson" is a lot like "Alan Smithee". He just forgot to tick the box this time.
Clearly StarCraft is not at fault here. No software should be capable of damaging your graphics card. But if the thermal design of your system is broken, then it's your fault, or the manufacturer's.
If your card breaks and there is nothing wrong with your cooling, then your card was already broken before you even fired up StarCraft.
Why are you even assuming the story is correct?
"Reports of graphics problems" is a bit nebulous, to say the least.
My money is on SlashFUD at this point in time.
StarCraft II is exposing shoddy thermal engineering in video cards because, unlike most games on the market, StarCraft II is correctly utilizing your video card to it's fullest potential.
Say what you will about SC2 game balance, say what you will about Battle.NET 2.0's crappy interface, say what you will about how cheesy Jim Raynor is. I wouldn't disagree with you.
But when it comes to writing engines, Blizzard is the best of the best. Hands down. Everything they write runs smooth as silk, and they have a genuine talent for squeezing jaw-dropping performance out of even mediocre computers. StarCraft II contains correctly written code, and it will utilize your hardware to it's fullest potential. If you bought a bargain computer, put it together yourself, and skimped on the cooling, you're going to get burned.
Pun intended.
I have as much hate as the next guy for how StarCraft II was cannibalized in the name of profit, but this article? This is a non-issue. This is not Blizzard's/StarCraft's fault.
Or a more developed version of the same argument:
Starcraft 2 has a pretty wide audience, by the standards of a PC/Mac game, and while it's certainly not a Crysis-style hardware-hog, it does have higher requirements than a lot of the usual mass-market PC games (eg. The Sims and its sequels). In addition, its prequel, which is 12 years old and was technically underwhelming by the standards of its own time (the graphically-far-superior Total Annihilation actually came out first) has a large hardcore fanbase, a lot of whom probably don't play much other than Starcraft.
So Starcraft 2 is released and is promptly installed on a lot of PCs that are not routinely used for gaming, or at least for playing games less than a decade old. A large chunk of these PCs have never run a high-end modern game before. When asked to do so, the less-than-stellar graphics cards in a good portion of them give up and fall over. No conspiracy, no fault in Starcraft 2, just a lot of crusty PCs being taken outside of their comfort zone and not faring so well.
The entire game is not capped. It's been that way since beta started. The framerate cap variables have also been published from shortly after the beta came out.
Why Blizzard doesn't cap their games at 60fps (or hell 120fps if they think 60 is too low for some reason) I don't know. There's really no reason to render frames faster than that, even if you can.
>it's not because your cooling is subpar
If your hardware can undergo a heat-related failure, then you have substandard cooling. That's pretty much the definition of substandard cooling.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Since I haven't seen anyone else post the fix, I will: Add the following lines to your "Documents\StarCraft II\variables.txt" file: frameratecapglue=30 frameratecap=60 You can add them to the beginning, end, or wherever. The game doesn't care.
Wouldn't ticking off the vsync option in the in-game settings be an easier way to fix the problem?
I'm having a hard time picturing any overlap between systems where unlimited framerate is a problem and vsync could drop your frame rate too low. I mean, usually it's the high end cards that have heat problems, not the ones where vsync might drop you to 1/2 or 1/4 refresh rate... If you have a high end card in a system that can't cool itself enough to use the card to it's full potential, who's problem is that?
I'm not sure why the parent post is tagged as insightful, because it's nonsense. Yes, some CPUs and GPUs are actually more powerful chips with defective components which were disabled, but the majority are not.
Nor does a fault in one part of the chip somehow make it less reliable than any other; faults are typically random due to imperfections in the die which affect only one small part of the silicon, and the rest of the chip will work without any problems.
The suggestion that that every CPU or GPU 'comes off one line' and is binned based on defects is pure monkey-talk.
The problem with enabling vsync is the following:
A standard LCD has 60Hz, which is about 1.67ms per frame. When your game requires 1.7ms to render a single frame, without vsync that's about 58.8fps, which isn't that bad (you wouldn't notice it).
When vsync is enabled, what happens is that the first frame isn't ready when the screen is refreshed, so the whole pipeline stalls until the next vertical sync. On the next one, you can finally display your image, and render again for 1.7ms. The whole cycle repeats. In the end, this means that you have a whooping 30fps, even though the graphics pipeline is idle nearly 50% of the time.
Of course, this doesn't make sense for the menu system, where the frame rendering doesn't take anywhere near 1.67ms, but it does make sense for the game itself, since it tends to lag a bit when the action is intense (esp. on creep).
There's a difference between "substandard" and "insufficient."
A standard cooling solution can be insufficient under the right circumstances, such as a card that doesn't rate TDP correctly and allows the card to exceed its published TDP through software. The cooling isn't the problem; the manufacturer is the problem.