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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?
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?
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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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Long answer: NOOOoooooooooooooooo!!!!!
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God /. you are WAY behind here. This was an issue 5 months ago in the Beta. There IS a hard cap in menus now.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.