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

Ridiculous.

[Mr EdgEy]

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.

Re:Ridiculous.

[Andy Dodd]

There is a parameter used for most high-dissipation ICs (such as CPUs and GPUs) - It's called "thermal design power".

This is the absolute maximum amount of heat the card can dissipate under any circumstances (not counting overclocking). The nature and definition of TDP means it should be physically impossible for ANY software to ever cause the card to exceed TDP.

If you have a system that can't handle the card running at TDP, that's faulty design of your system, not whatever caused it to hit TDP.

Re:Ridiculous.

[Anonymous Coward]

If a graphics card cant survive a tight loop like that then it's designed by an idiot. My intel processor can survive that state.. and NO it's not like putting the car in neutral and mashing the throttle. you are comparing a device with a rotating mass getting sped up PAST the designed rpm rate+time point that actually would not cause a problem because of the rev limiter kicking in.

electronics, my uneducated friend, are different as there are NOT any moving parts in it.. This may surprise you.

I am tired of electronics nowdays designed for highest profit and not for quality. Engineers for chip makers are complete fucking morons if this is really happening.

Re:Ridiculous.

[alen]

you forget that most chips people buy these days are the equivelant of "off the rack" clothing. they are manufacturing rejects that are sold as lower end cards. just like Xeon CPU's and the top of the line $600 graphics cards being the only ones that are a result of "perfect" manufacturing. everything else from i Core to your $150 graphics cards are manufacturing rejects with circuitry disabled. it's not like there is a production process for every single SKU of the 20 or so that ATI/Nvidia sell at any one time.

it all comes off one line, tested, binned and then circuitry is disabled depending on the results of the testing

Re:Ridiculous.

[surgen]

While that fact is interesting, if I bought a chip that says it could do X, I still expect it to live up to X. It doesn't matter if X is a reject from manufacturing Y. If they were Y-rejects that still can't handle X, don't sell it as such.

Re:Ridiculous.

[sjames]

Not so much design. A few other new games have had this issue (notably Star trek online).

TDP assumes, wrongly, that your card is perfectly clean, and that the fan controls are always correct, which might be the case on a reference designed card, but might not quite be the case on factory overclocked boards or if there have been aftermarket tweaks to the driver to adjust the fan speed (which is usually a noise problem).

You're also assuming the fan is still perfectly mounted (which it might not have been in the first place), and that sort of thing. The PSU needs to be able to feed enough juice to the card, the case needs to be properly ventilated (and ideally cleaned), and god knows what other bits you've got in this board. Lots of boards have a northbridge fan that sits directly above the (first) gpu nowdays.

That is still a design issue. Proper engineering includes appropriate margins for error to deal with the real world including things getting dirty and not being put together perfectly.

Not everything is designed to operate at 100% duty cycle, but in those cases, the duty cycle is well documented and there are usually mechanisms in place to prevent actual damage if the limits are exceeded. Note how in the inevitable car analogy, there are warning lights and significant physical warning signs (such as steam pouring out of the engine compartment to let you know you have exceeded the engine's design capabilities. Unless you're stupid enough to ignore that and keep pushing, the engine suffers no actual damage.

Imagine the outrage people might feel if the engine's design limits could be exceeded just cruising down the highway and the first sign of it was that the engine just stops running and never starts again. There would most certainly be a class action suit alleging that the engine was defective by design.

Re:Not sure I get the reasoning here

[Dragoniz3r]

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.

Already dead

[KirstuNael]

Graphics card that can't handle working to its full potential is already dead (as designed).

Seriously..?

[Fusione]

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.

Even if its true...

[Richard_at_work]

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...

Mindless, driveling sensationalism

[Nimey]

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.

My guess? Users need to STFU

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:more than crash... damage

[rotide]

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.

Re:Not sure I get the reasoning here

[crossmr]

At this point I suspect "Kdawson" is a lot like "Alan Smithee". He just forgot to tick the box this time.

Re:read: StarCraft will expose your crappy setup

[RogueyWon]

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.

This is this way the entire game

[vitaflo]

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.

Re:Parent is insightful.

[fishbowl]

>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.

Re:Parent is insightful.

[Fjandr]

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.