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:Don't make car analogies if you don't understan

[BobMcD]

Whatever a CPU or GPU is rated to for speed is not a temporary max, it is what it can run at full time. If there is a failure, it indicates a defect of some kind somewhere.

That's a wonderful world to live in, but it isn't exactly the real world. The chief advantage of the real world over the one you describe is that stuff here is a lot cheaper. This world has laptops that aren't necessarily 'toughbooks' and commodity hardware that is often imperfect, but 'good enough' for most uses until it becomes obsolete and you replace it anyway. None of the stuff bought in the here and now will handle running full-bore for very long unless you paid an exorbitant amount for it.