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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."
You can uncap the framerate in lots of games, but we've never heard about this problem before. I don't think this is a problem. Especaily since you can easily make a GFX card run at full capacity and a low framerate by simply playing a game that's a little too new for it, something a lot of people trying to put off upgrades do. If your GFX card can't run at it's maximum capacity without overheating, something is wrong with its cooling.
When graphics cards overheat, the worst thing that happens is a blue screen. On ATI cards, they just restart the card (it does a recovery-mode type of thing).
You can overclock any card to insane temperatures (90C+) without them even turning off, much less breaking them. There is simply no way that Starcraft 2 is killing any graphics cards.
There *was* one issue with an nvidia patch a while back which a driver update actually did kill some graphics cards, but it was nvidia's fault, and they promptly fixed it.
This article is pure misinformation.
The summary says an overheated video card will crash. It will do more than crash. It can permanently damage the video hardware. This seems like a major hassle to swap out the video components on a big gaming rig, but it can be a lot worse for high-end laptops. I've had similar problems with 3D software running on a MacBook Pro -- plenty of performance, but the video card gets second priority in the heat-management.
In my MBP, there are separate temperature probes on the CPU, hard drive, battery and chipset, but none on the dual video chip units, so the thermostat-controlled fan won't even kick in when either the "integrated" nor the "high performance" video units are the only stressed component.
Besides the hardware cooling problems, there's no reason for trying to draw more than 120 fps on most LCDs; software needs to get more responsible about heat and speed resource usage when given access to over-spec hardware. Limit the rendering loop to 90~120 fps, unless you're doing something purposely exotic such as driving stereoscopic displays or CAVEs (at 90~120 fps per camera).
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The issue is quite simple, stardock had the same issue with galciv 2. There are people playing sc2 who do not play games that fully tax the graphics card as these scenes do, and do not have well ventilated cases, causing the cards to overheat and crash. The issue is solved with a simple frame rate cap. Or the consumer to adequately ventilate their case.
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No kidding. SC2 may end up being more intense if it happens to be just the right balance so that the ROPs, TMUs, and shaders all get to work to near capacity, but same shit: If your card crashes the problem is your setup, not the game. For a demo that'll kick the crap out of your card heat wise, try Furmark. It is designed such to run the chip to its absolute limits and thus have maximum power draw. If your system bombs it isn't the demo that is wrong, it is your computer. Maybe you don't have enough power, maybe your ventilation is bad, maybe your GPU has a defect in it. Whatever the case an intense load that causes a crash is revealing a problem, not causing it. Your system should handle any load given to it.
Reminds me of this video from Tom's Hardware, circa 2001.