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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.
Are most games framerate-capped? Wouldn't all games, at all times, be rendering as quickly as possible, operating to the graphics card's full potential?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
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.
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.
I'm playing Starcraft II on the last-gen iMac (purchased about four months ago) on OS X 10.6.3. The game is stable during gameplay, but it's crashed on me several times in cutscenes, onboard the Hyperion, or even in the main menu (ironically, while I was bringing up the menu to quit the game).
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).
This may have been the problem I experienced. I had played in the (multiplayer only) beta with no problems. Once the game came out though, I kept crashing in single player in between levels. I cleaned the dust out of my computer and that solved the problem.
I wonder how many people experiencing this just have too much dust built up in their computers?
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
s/I don't think this is a problem./This sounds like a red herring to me.
And the article talks about dust being the problem; which is exactly what I was thinking of when I said "something is wrong with its cooling". I've had that problem before with my old GPU; in Left 4 Dead 2 (but not in older games like TF2) I'd get great slowdowns every so often and my GPU was running pretty hot. Turns out it was throttling itself to keep itself from getting even hotter. A heatsink cleanout fixed that right up.
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.
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.
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...
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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No. Crappy cards that overheat when left running displaying ANYTHING (static images, top-end 3D, what does it matter?) are killing those graphics cards. CPU's (and therefore GPU's) should detect overheat, then throttle back or switch off as necessary. If that still causes a problem in 2010, you have bigger problems on your hands than how often a game decides to blit surfaces about - such as a potential fire. If your case is that dirty, your card should still cope anyway, even if that means it just overheats a little, alerts you to the fact, then shuts down - or that you notice it starts running really slow and yet still ramping its fans up to maximum.
What it happens to be running when this happens is neither here nor there. This whole article just sounds like a way to scaremonger people into not buying StarCraft 2 (which I wouldn't be purchasing anyway, in case anyone wants to question why I debunk this crap). This is NOT a Starcraft-only problem. I could make a fifty-line bit of code with SDL and OpenGL that could tax a graphics card - it shouldn't make it stop working or die unless you've done something very stupid like : overclock, disable warnings, ignore alarms.
Long answer: NOOOoooooooooooooooo!!!!!
This sig all sigs devours
We're talking about a piece of hardware here which is capable of melting itself down with no internal cap on processing, and we're blaming the software?
IANAE (I am not an engineer) but it seems to me that the software designers should be able to throw whatever they like at the cards, and it's up to the hardware manufacturers to see to it that the hardware doesn't self destruct.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Is this Orrin Hatch's "Destroy the PCs" plan made manifest? It has taken 7 years, but what subtle, indeed Machiavellian implementation.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
If you're overclocking your card, I can see how running at full capacity could eventually succumb to thermal damage. If your card is stock, then how exactly is "taxing" it at 100% going to damage it? Does your CPU fry when it runs at 99% or 100%? Of course not - unless it is overclocked (too much) or otherwise improperly installed or configured.
If these cards are not overclocked and Star Craft truly IS killing them, it definitely has nothing to do with the cards running at full capacity and overheating.
People understand that these cards are tested off the line, right? They know what these cards can run at when they manufacture them. Not to mention, plenty of people also run various distributed projects on their GPUs without any problem whatsoever.
God /. you are WAY behind here. This was an issue 5 months ago in the Beta. There IS a hard cap in menus now.
What about OpenCL/CUDA? These frameworks use the card's full potential, so far nobody reported any issues. If the card has cooling problems, it's clearly the faulty hardware. The only downside is a slightly more heat and noise from the videocard than there should be during these scenes. This is not a car where revving the engine on neutral indeed stresses the engine.
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've been assuming all this time that the drivers would limit my framerate to be equal to my monitor refresh rate. I have a 60 Hz monitor, is there any reason to get more than 60 fps? It seems like having drivers to do that for you would save a bit of electricity and be good PR for the company that made them. Edumacate me, please o_o
I mean when I code I never think "Well my code needs to check to see if it might damage hardware." since I try to keep my coding agnostic to the system it's on. (Admittedly financial software in the last place I worked) Starcraft 2 is using either DirectX or OpenGL so I'd expect to be hardware agnostic as well.(Sorry, I'm not a graphics guy so I might be talking out of my but.) Seriously, if I remember correctly there were systems in the early 80's that you could damage if certain code was executed in a certain way but didn't people consider that hardware flaw?(Really, it's no different than expecting them to write code in the game to check for a temperature spike because a fan fell off the card. How would they know what a bad temp would be without writing card specific code?)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
The first Command & Conquer game was released in 1995, with full-motion video cutscenes. Those scenes did not destroy any graphics cards that met the system requirements for the game. Why would video scenes start doing this to modern video cards?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
during the gameplay of the single player campaign, the nvidia drivers I got did the dance to restart themselfs once, without a hitch(the game didn't crash either, just a blinking of the screen and a note about it waiting on the desktop after quitting).
but saying that using your graphics card at full juice is essentially saying that pcmark& etc programs would do it as well. there's an issue with the card already if it's killing them. the real problem with the game is that it hasn't evolved at all from starcraft 1, the units need intentionally more micromanagement than what feels right, you can't zoom the camera out so that you could keep an eye on two spots at once and so forth.
btw spoiler: bases make surprisingly good elements to use as walls to herd the zerg into killzones(in last mission anyhow).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The more time passes, the less time people understand anything about their computers, and unfortunately this includes most kids these days..
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
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.
I've played lots of games that have been too intense for my graphics card to run at 60fps. That is the game was pushing them to 100% of what they were capable of. Don't remember CATCHING ON FIRE because of it.
Poor story? I think so.
This is not putting your car in neutral and laying on the gas, it is a meaningless comparison. GPUs have no problem rendering excess frames, lots of excess frames, and simply not making any real use of them. This is no more a problem than having a CPU run a computationally intensive test that doesn't do anything. There is no difference from a heat or function standpoint between all the units being fully active rendering something simple quickly or all the units being active rendering something complex slowly. In either case all the logic is active with lots of power flowing through and thermal output is maxed. A component should be able to handle this, no problem. 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.
The most usual defect is inadequate airflow. People have a case with poor airflow, and reduce it further by not clearing dust buildup. As such the components can't cool themselves well enough.
As the GP said: This is a non-issue. If it happens to you, the game revealed a problem, it didn't cause it. Fix your system.
The summary should say that it's the Evil Giant Killer Dust Bunnies From Hell, not Starcraft, that are shutting down the cards.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Some building do this: at weekends, turn off and on the power of the whole building. This serve the purpose to force these bulbs that are about to fail.. to fail sooner. Maybe SC2 has one of the most popular games released in years is working as a unintended "break test". But it will be good if Blizzard adds some caps *anyway*.
-Woof woof woof!
I left the game running frequently (as I'm lazy) at these cut-scenes for almost 4 days straight, and I had no problems.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
This 15 page thread has some people who say they've had melted cards. A lot of the problems seem to be with laptops. As a corollary, people are reporting that the "fix" also helps with Alt+tab speed if anyone cares about that. http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/starcraft2/show_msgs.php?topic_id=m-1-55785055&pid=939643&page=2 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.
I agree. Thermal engineering bites even big names in the ass. Repeatedly. MacBook Air, anyone?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
well to be honest, there are so few cases with good airflow, and then the GPU manufacturers skimp on the cooling power of the stock heatsinks. 12volts and 10 amps is 120 watts, so yes you will need some substantial cooling to keep things in spec temps. Although cases like the SG07 have dedicated cold air for the GPU and a fair amount of cooling on the backside of the card as well.
In the end though, this really should be a non issue, with proper component selection, placement and cooling.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Uh, no, eating as much GPU power as possible to render a static scene hundreds of times a second on a display that can only probably display 60 frames per second is not an example of properly-written software. In fact, it's just plain stupid, and nearly as wrong as you can possibly be.
That said, it shouldn't have any effect on graphics cards other than making less resources available to other concurrently-running programs, and Blizzard should in no way be blamed for breaking people's cards.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Here's an idea! Grab a $3 can of canned air/air duster from Office Depot/Staples/Office Max/Fry's Electronics/Best Buy, open up the side of your computer, and then spray out all the dust that's accumulated in your graphics card fan and heatsink since the first StarCraft came out.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
I don't disagree that SC2 ISN'T causing the cards to die, but I'd like you to take a trip down memory lane that was Diablo 2 Direct3D performance :)
touché
If it is anything like the original it is killing college aspirations, careers and marriages and the nation of South Korea. Graphics cards should be the least of our concerns!!! I say this as a survivor of SC. Oh and Total Annihilation was the better game!!
I too, ran GLXGEARS to check my framerate, and was pulling 3500 FPS on a 6 month old good card, and was wondering - "HOLY fuct! -what card do you have that runs that fast?"
And then I remembered you could shrink the screen, and get higher FPS
(makes glxgers screen tiny)
20,900 FPS
21,500 FPS
meh...
..........FULL STOP.
Are you sure you didn't steal this headline from Glenn Beck?
try vacuuming your card's heat sink,
and then see if it happens
I'm just saying
..........FULL STOP.
I sincerely doubt that the summary's claim is true, any decent graphics card should either underclock itself to lower the heat generation, or simply BSOD on you. Furthermore, if scenes are very easily rendered, wouldn't this also automatically mean that less of the chip is used ? I'm no expert in graphics hardware design, but one would think (I know, bad idea) that they would have special parts of the silicon dedicated to some more complicated tasks, which in a case like this wouldn't be used at all. If that is true, then it would mean less of the silicon is used than during rendering of really complicated and intensive scenes that make your FPS drop below your screen's refresh rate, and thus would automatically generate less heat.
One thing that I know is true on some systems (my experience is mainly with mobile) that artificially limiting the FPS does have huge effects on energy consumption (and thus heat generation).
This might sound surprising, but a lot of mobile devices simply have a non-operating VSYNC. As in, the system will think and report it is using VSYNC, but in reality it simply does not work. This can lead to all sorts of interesting artefacts and stuttering when an OpenGL game's FPS blows through the screen's refresh rate. As mobile devices generally have either 50 or 60hz displays, (optionally) artificially limiting the framerate in the game's code (or in patched drivers, as seems to be more common on these devices) by making sure no more than one frame is rendered per 18ms or so both does wonders for visual quality, framerate stability, and indeed energy consumption (and thus heat generation) - the latter only if the game is much simpler than the chip can handle, which on newer mobiles is very common.
If you assume the same holds true for "real" computers, it makes me wonder why games do not try to do something similar - regardless of whether not doing it kills cards or not. After all, if you can detect the screen's framerate in code, and you are not in benchmark mode, there is no reason to render faster than the screen can display, all it does is use more power. Artificially limiting the FPS in such a case would make the game greener - assuming VSYNC is not already turned on.
Say something really stupid, rephrase it as a question, and then it doesn't sound as stupid anymore. Jon Stewart should update his video to include this "story."
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The blue quote from the article was originally presented in beta, as a response to the issue which I believe was covered on /. at the time.
Anyway, they said they fixed it in the patch after the issue came up and was addressed by said blue poster.
which shouldnt matter one bit for a graphics card, as it does not have any moving parts like your engine.
a graphics card should be able to process at top capacity 24/7, if it is not able to do that, due to for example cooling failure, it should throttle itself back.
People, what a bunch of bastards
I see what you mean, but I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. When I am running a video game, it is the "only" thing currently being ran. It does not have to compete for resources. And I would prefer it to gobble up every bit of horsepower it could find in the name of making things look even marginally better. That is the sign of a robust framework that will properly scale to future increases in hardware potential.
Now, if I had cooling issues, which I don't, and found myself wanting to limit it's 912 FPS cutscenes, which I don't, and couldn't find a way to do that, I would claim that the lack of such a feature was a significant design flaw worthy of debate, but it turns out, they've already got it covered:
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.
To learn how many people actually play the campaigns. I have treated every *craft game as multiplayer (or me vs AI) only from the first time I played any of them, I have played one or two missions ever and that was on the original SC, but I have logged hundreds upon hundreds of hours on these games.
Actually I thought the GPP was making an artful meta-analogy. "TFA is wrong about graphics cards the way I'm wrong about cars."
The only way that TFA's "rendering simple scenes fast" could possibly be true is if modern graphics cards have some component that does something brief but power-hungry, once a frame, that is adequately heat-sunk for normal operation but which causes overheating at high frame rates. That said, TFA seems more to be pointing the finger at old, poorly assembled machines which have thermal issues *anyway* and are probably being pushed hard for the first time in years.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
The fix is easy, requiring players to add the following lines to your "Documents\StarCraft II\variables.txt" file: frameratecapglue=30 frameratecap=60
There's no way that Starcraft II is killing GPU's. It's the GPU's themselves that aren't cooled properly and probably can't handle the settings the game is set to. So either: 1. Get a better graphics card 2. Get better cooling for the existing graphics card 3. Get better cooling for the computer case 4. Get that 3 year old dust-bunny out of the computer
literally the worst post in the history of slashdot.
Our game is so awesome it kills graphics cards. Man, that's off the hook!
As proof that it works, they made slashdot with the game named in the headline.
fans audibly speed up, but it hasn't caused any problems. I'm using 2x GTX 280's. These devices are intended to run at full speed at a 100% capacity though.
Also - try turning V-Sync on (by default its off) that will cap the framerate ;).
...I'd imagine many people who bought this in the past few days aren't standard gamers who clean their machines often.
Accordingly, I bet the people experiencing crashes would experience crashes with virtually any modern 3D game, not just SC2.
Few games exist like SC2 which bring non-gamers back into the gaming market.
And you all jumped to the wrong conclusion, if you think the game is the problem...
The scene does run your card just as fast as it can. This is just exposing the true state of your system - can it cool your cards, etc., at max utilization? If not, you suffer failure.
I wonder how many high-end graphics cards have inadequate on-board cooling for real-world applications. Do they test them in adverse environments? Dust? Interrupted or blocked airflow? I know, that's not really their problem, but imagine you buy tires for your daily driver that were only tested to the limits of smooth highway at 65MPH, on a nice 80 degree summer day. Take these out for a quick spin from Phoenix to Tuscon this Friday when it should be 106, and I-10 is washboard or worse for some stretches of 75MPH. Yeah, you'll be disappointed if they blow off the rim, huh? It happens anyways, cause people run them underinflated or past their useful life. But if graphics card manufacturers don't test somewhere near a worst-case environment, well, this result we're reading about should be no surprise.
And TFA shows a picture of a rig with some dust bunnies in it. Ha! My regular rig gets a LOT more than that in 3 months, and I get to go in and vacuum up all that, and the filters. It's dusty in the desert. I clean filters a lot, all over the house. I keep a scientific experiment running at work to see how much dust will accumulate on my one mostly-empty letter tray before the cleaning crew wipes it. 4mm is the maximum so far, and that took 6 months. It looks like the HVAC here is not filtering very well.
A non-story, but interesting. I usually (well, always) run WinPrime on a new rig for 18-24 hours after I build it, just to heat stress the components. Now I have a test for the graphics card. I'm happy. And I'll be buying more fans I guess.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I had this exact problem with the between-mission videos (horrible artifacts, and eventual lockup). Since I run an nvidia card (gtx 260) which came overclocked from the factory, the solution was to download the EVGA Precision Tool (don't worry, it works on most nvidia cards, not just ones manufactured by EVGA). With it I could increase the speed of the fan, and underclock the GPU to prevent it from overheating. For me, the solution was to increase the fan speed to 100% and to decrease the GPU clock speed from 655 MHz to 630. I didn't notice any drop in frame-rate and things run stable now.
Bad drivers are killing video cards.
No game, or any other software for that matter, should be able to kill a video card, under any circumstances. If that's possible, it's the fault of the hardware manufacturer and/or driver developers.
I bought a DELL sutio xps 16. It is gets hot very fast with almost every game I play but it looks like it is working fine even when it's hot. Then I played SC2. It got so hot that I dared to touch it, but it never stopped working. Just as a precaution I lifted it about half-inch and put a my small fan to blow air under it. It got cooler and I was able to play SC2 with FULL graphics. (ati radeon hd 4670 with dual-core P8600)
Captain, the pipelines are filling up, we need to eject the warp core!
Seriously, this summary sounds retarded. A pipeline in a processor is not an actual line of pipes.
rooooar
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.
Starcraft II is so awesome it can reveal whether your video card needs cleaning or is defective or not! Next up, can Starcraft II cure cancer?
What a big steam load...
I thought this was just my old laptop not having enough air flow. My solution was to use those gel ice packs to keep it cool. I keep having to swap them out about once an hour. I've got one of those belkin laptop coolers, I even started using the kids ice pops and putting them on both sides of the fan. It works. Some of that has to do with room air temp too. I'm in the south and it has been in the 90's and I can't get my house below 76 during the day. At night it drops to 72 and it doesn't overheat.
I don't know if the cause being described in the summary is the technical cause, but the game has overheated my system and cause it to shutdown about 10 times now.
Exactly. Agree. That's the story here for anyone confused; hardware can be killed through software through no real fault of the user. See for instance Furmark which ATI tries to throttle by checking for its name! No, you don't have to overclock, no, it's not because your cooling is subpar or because of dust or anything else, it's because HWVs don't want to spend the ten cents or whatever to take away the 'can run over peak for a few seconds' capability.
They're knowingly releasing hardware that can't survive 'full throttle', and it's bullshit.
PS. Here's a 8800GT fried during SC2.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
You're misunderstanding the issue, then. Say your 2nd window needs 5% of your GPU's total processing power. SC2 requires maybe 65% to render that cut scene at 60 FPS, but can scale up to 100% and just render unseen frames to give you 200 FPS (or whatever). What's going to happen is your desktop is going to get its 5% just fine, and SC2 is going to use the other 95% and render say 190 FPS. The point being, SC2 is only gobbling up the UNUSED clock cycles/cores/RAM/whatever from the GPU to render those extra frames, therefore any other applications should not see any performance loss. This is exactly how a properly written piece of software should behave. You should only *notice* the performance degrade in SC2 or your other apps once your other apps need more than 45% of the GPU (at which point SC2 or the other apps would start dipping under 60 FPS, or whatever the desired level of performance was).
If SC2 did always attempt to use 100% of the GPU regardless of other apps (which it does not) then you would be correct and it would be a problem.
You've got me over a barrel here because the topic of debate is a non-interactive cutscene. You're right, of course, that there's no logical way to defend re-rendering a non-interactive scene that will be pixel-for-pixel identical. So if StarCraft II were designed to be a cutscene-rendering-engine, you'd be spot-on.
Since you've pressed the point, I might be willing to admit that the behavior in question, rendering non-interactive cutscenes at insanely high framerates, is indeed a bug, possibly a significant one, although not one that I personally care about.
I would ask you, however, to keep in mind that StarCraft II is primarily a game engine that is also being used to render cutscenes, and as soon as interactivity is added to the mix, this behavior is exactly what gamers expect, and if solving this "cutscene" issue at all impacts the way the game actual performs, it would be a disservice to gamers.
Any CAL-I Counter-Strike player can tell you that, as soon as you've got a mouse cursor moving around, you can immediately tell the difference between 60 FPS, 100 FPS, and 140 FPS, even if your eyes can't. I maintain that Blizzard did it correctly and this cutscene issue, although an issue, is an ancillary, unforseen issue stemming from a correctly designed engine, rather than a flawed engine.
Actually you can often buy a video card with at least a half decent cooling solution for $10-$20 more than the lowest priced option with a complete joke of a fan/heatsink attached. Considering there is a sizable segment of enthusiats who will benchmark their rigs for hours at a time saying nothing bought now can handle running full-bore for long is shortsighted. Maybe if you go for the absolute cheapest part every time with no regard to quality or performance.
One issue I have noticed, most video card manufacturers set the fan thresholds too high, I wasn't happy with how hot my GTX 260's would get before the fan kicked up noticeably in speed so I modified the settings using EVGA's Precision software. My guess is they do this to keep people from whining about fan noise, personally I'll take a little louder fan over running my card too hot any day. Sadly most marketing departments think cheap and quiet is more important.
Uh, I was CAL-I and I'm also a programmer and you're wrong.
Also what the fuck do you mean "even if your eyes can't?" Yes I can tell the difference between 100 and 140 FPS but that's because my eyes don't have a vertical refresh and asynchronously sense different parts of the picture, so although no one cone updates faster than its own refresh, the total view can't really be given a "frames per second" measure, not because I'm strong in the fucking force or something.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Also if cutscenes are an unanticipated part of a game engine, your game designers, architects, programmers, and TQA are all literally retarded, as in mentally disabled.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Perhaps they could could find more time to properly edumacate themselves if you didn't let them hang out on your lawn so much, the least you could do is leave a couple old Computer 101 textbooks in the milkbox on the porch for 'em to peruse.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
The only possible way StarCraft 2 can do that is because it's the first PC game in a long time that is good to make use of your video card. Most people play WoW on their PC... and well, while once top of the line, the graphics are kind of sitting still (still love the look)... and not making use of newer video cards. Aside from WoW, there has not been that many great PC games come out -- Dragon Age came and gone, etc. But with StarCraft 2 coming out, looking good... it's making everyone put their video cards to use again... and well, if they are not cleaned out, when that fan spins faster to process more heat... it's going to break and fry the card. Just my two cents. If you don't use it, you lose it.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
As the GP said: This is a non-issue. If it happens to you, the game revealed a problem, it didn't cause it. Fix your system.
The reason people are complaining in this case more than others is that SC2 happens to create more heat than Furmark on these menu-like screens.
In principle, there's nothing to be scared about when rendering a lot of frames.
In principle, this will only reveal faulty cooling, not break the unbroken.
In practice, rendering SC2 menus is just about the most taxing activity a graphics card can perform. It wouldn't hurt for a patch to cap the framerate, since there's absolutely no benefit to all of those extra frames, and a substantial portion of users haven't cleaned the dust out of their cooling fins lately.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Calling SwapBuffers() isn't going to overheat anything because it does no real work and won't heat up the chip.
I suspect the real truth is that their cooling fans are too clogged up with filth to do their job.
No sig today...
Game programmers are not responsible for coddling poorly cooled video card hardware, game programmers are supposed to flog video card hardware within an inch of its life. Video cards that melt while operating under a well defined API (Direct3D or OpenGL for example) are defective.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
A to render a frame the video card will set some states, process the vertex data, interpolate some stuff and hand it to the pixel shaders, produce a frame and swap the frame buffer pointer. If you are running a complicated frame that can only render at 10fps, or just drawing one triangle at a billion fps, inside of 1 minute, the card probably performed the same number of calculations. It can only transform so many vertices, it can only do so many texture look ups. You can do a bazillion operations a second, the complexity of your scene dictates how often in there you can swap the buffer. swapping the buffer is a pointer update. There is no pixel friction as the frame is blasted through memory.
This is no more a problem than having a CPU run a computationally intensive test that doesn't do anything.
I had two ThinkPad laptops that did bad stuff when I did CPU-intensive work (like zooming in as far as possible in an SVG using Inkscape v. 0.45) for extended periods of time. I suspected it was due to overheating, but IBM/Lenovo said that couldn't be the problem. The result was that the computer froze, and wouldn't turn on again after being forced off. The "fix" was to replace the mainboard, which gave the laptop another few months of life. I ended up getting an R50 replaced with an R51 that had the same problem. I've seen the same thing happen with a Dell laptop (although those say "the computer shut down because it overheated" on next startup, unlike the ThinkPads), and I think it may possibly also happen with my current acer laptop (although I've not experienced anything as bad as the ThinkPads).
It has caused significant problems for me, so I wouldn't recommend to others to run laptops at 100% for extended periods of time. Laptops should be designed to handle that, but in my experience, they aren't.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
...and guess that the main culprits in these crashes are overclocked (possibly by the manufacturer) GPUs in tricked out systems with inadequate cooling.
What is the benefit of rendering a frame that cannot be be displayed?
I do not see benefits, but there are clear costs. The extra energy used to render the unused frames is a cost, and the energy used by the A/C to remove the heat from the building is a cost.
It was me, I did it, I moved your cheese
this article should be renamed to:
Zerg Dust Bunnies Wreak Havoc on Graphic Cards.
Arcturus Mengsk had this to comment: "These dust bunnies are are obviously caused by the terrorist actions of Jim Raynor!"
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.
Fairly static? What is that even supposed to mean? They take the same amount of graphical processing as any other part of the game.
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.
This exact same thing happened with Star Trek Online about a year ago. At first I thought it was dubious as well, but the reports looked pretty believable, and patch notes eventually mentioned adding frame-rate caps to resolve just this issue.
Use compressed air instead. The reason for this is that vacuum cleaners manage to generate an inordinate amount of static that will fry your card's chip (unless if finds a good path to earth first).
Very common on hacked together gaming rigs.
(Staring down at my water cooled desktop) Oh, really? Gamers have no idea what they're doing when they put a machine together right?
Get a Mac
Oh, that explains it. Yes, get a Mac. Ahaha haha aha ha aha ha ha. Sorry you have just disqualified yourself from any meaningful debate on computer performance. The only numbers Macs excel in is price - but you do realize I can buy my setup 3 times over for the price of the Mac equivalent, right? Personally I will keep my money, and replace my hardware if it fails. After all, I just have to buy the failed component and not replace the whole desktop.
Right click on this post for a special message. Oh wait, you can't.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I guess I don't understand your comment. Hanging out on my lawn?
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Actually most modern cars have rev limiters, so it is a pretty good analogy. Mash on the gas and the electronics kick in and stop the engine from destroying itself when the RPMs top out. I know CPU's have had thermal diodes for throttling down voltage/speed when things get too hot.
The most usual defect is inadequate airflow. People have a case with poor airflow, and reduce it further by not clearing dust buildup. As such the components can't cool themselves well enough
Even the worst designed air-flow should not cause damage. Components should shut themselves off before they are in danger of damage. CPUs do this, GPUs should too.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
you must be new here
http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1483&aid=-1
1. Search for lawn (and probably "new here" as well).
2. ???
3. Profit!
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
So, where in your code would you put the delay in order to be sure that it won't cause the game to feel less responsive? Just after the rendering? How exactly will you determine the duration of the delay? How about timing accuracy? Sleep() on Windows is in milliseconds. And how will you deal with frame rendering time suddenly dropping or rising? I know it doesn't matter in the menus of Starcraft II, but I can promise you that some crazy Koreans will care a lot if Blizzard put an (unnecessary) Sleep() in their main loop. Of course this needs to be an option (which it is).
RTFA
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
I blame them
Many video cards can exceed their TDP through certain sequences of instructions
Yes. Apparently, Blizzard happened to utilize the HCF Instruction (Halt-and-Catch-Fire) in their SCII coding.
All my hardware designs are required to have all sorts of hardware protection to guarantee that no matter what, it cannot harm itself.
For example ALL amplifiers in an REF chain are configured such that they cannot overpower the max input power range of subsequent stages.
Power supplies have thermal shutdowns (and over current foldback protection).
All devices controlled by FPGA's have appropriate pullups/downs to assure that they are in known stages if the FPGA is loaded with bogus data and leaves the outputs high-Z.
Sounds to me like the cards had grossly under-designed cooling, and that some dipshit forgot to pay $0.02 for a temperature monitor with proper interlocks to shutdown and self protect. Lame.
After playing SC2 for a couple of hours, the screen started to blink, and after 2 seconds, died (black).
The game was still on - I could hear the music.
After a reset to the system, everything was fine.
So, should I put back the active cooler?
Preface: I had previously had heat issues with my Nvidia 9800 when running Photoshop.. My computer crashed hard. I took a look at the PC and found that the GPU heatsink was covered in dust and the fan was spinning but not able to pull any air through. Since then the card is clean and pulling air through but I don't know what damage might have been done. I've experienced crashing issues in the middle of playing Starcraft II. I believe every time my system crashed it was during game play and not during the video's but I know that the crash was due to the video card (one time I got a blue screen with the nvidia driver listed and the other's the system's video got corrupted and it locked hard.) I do now know what kind of condition my card is in due to possible previous damage from lack of cooling. But I do know that Starcraft II stresses it enough now to heat it up and crash it even with a clean heatsink.
FALSE... and short sighted.
You do realize the a video cards is more then just a GPU, right? and that they require cooling?
Maxing the GPU means everything else on the board is peaking, including the fan. Just in case you don't know, fans are moving devices.
If the fan fails because it is running at max current for too long, the card fails. If the components on the card aren't rated the same as the GPU, they fail.
"? These GPU's are designed to operate at max temp."
Not for extended periods of time. The are designed to operate at max temp for bursts. Extended use at max temperature will cause the chip casing to become damaged. This mean less efficiency when dissipating heat.
If a game is causing a Video card to run at max for many minutes at a time, the risk of failure rises sharply. This pretty much applies to any boards.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This isn't a problem that can be blamed on software or any specific game, driving the hardware as designed. Unfortunately, to "fix" it for good takes some elbow grease, as it seems every videocard manufacturer is following the same poor-tolerances-optimized manufacturing scheme. Take out the videocard (if removable), remove the fiddly spring-clips that hold the heatsink onto the GPU, peel those silly rubber 'bumpons' from the corners and throw them in the trash. Seriously. While you're at it, make sure the idiots didn't leave a rough GPU contact surface of the heatsink, or worse, paint this surface (if either, sand off any paint and lap flat). Remove 99% of that giant wad of OEM thermal grease left on the chip. I'd recommend trashing those springclips too and use a couple 4-40 bolts (lightly finger tight only!) to ensure firm but gentle contact to the GPU. Remember that thermal compound (no matter how "good" thermal compound, diamond-silver-nanotube or whatever) is a crutch for filling nanoscale imperfections in mating surfaces; it is NOT a substitute for metal-to-metal contact.
The weak-springclips-and-bumpons thing is a manufacturing hack to facilitate machine assembly of cheap heatsinks onto cards, where the thickness of the heatsink can vary considerably and the assembly bot can unknowingly crush the GPU with tens-hundreds of lbs blocked force due to a too-thick heatsink contacting sooner than expected. To avoid this, manufacturers intentionally stand off the heatsink from the GPU up to half a mm or more using these rubber pads, then use a thick blob of white thermal grease to make up the difference. The conductivity of this stuff is poor (relative to metal-metal contact) as it is, moving to worthless in a year or two when it begins to dry up and peel/shrink away from the GPU.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.