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Is StarCraft II Killing Graphics Cards?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the wish-i-had-a-copy dept.

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."

39 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. Ridiculous. by Mr+EdgEy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Ridiculous. by Vectormatic · · Score: 4, Informative

      i was thinking the same thing, many games arent FPS-capped anyway, and even in capped games, gamers will put the settings up so high that the game wont run at the capped framerate all the time

      Graphic cards should be able to cope with it, although i do believe that it is possible to load a GPU in such a way that more transistors are active at the same time then the manufacturer thought would happen.

      So unless there are reports of thousands of melted video cards, i call shens

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      People, what a bunch of bastards
    2. Re:Ridiculous. by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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    3. Re:Ridiculous. by V!NCENT · · Score: 5, Funny

      $ glxgears
      5791 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1158.177 FPS
      7120 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1423.968 FPS
      6801 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1360.132 FPS
      7110 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1421.871 FPS

      Nope. No meltdown. Totally BS...

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      Here be signatures
    4. Re:Ridiculous. by Zeussy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game
    5. Re:Ridiculous. by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    6. Re:Ridiculous. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    7. Re:Ridiculous. by bertok · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      Many video cards can exceed their TDP through certain sequences of instructions, and the drivers include code to prevent this from occurring. There's been issues in the past where this filter wasn't perfect, and cards were destroyed, typically when executing GPU stress tests.

    8. Re:Ridiculous. by alen · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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

    9. Re:Ridiculous. by Sir_Sri · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      As a developer there's a bit you can, and should be doing to prevent this sort of thing. This sort of problem happens a couple of ways. One is the 'draw a simple scene as fast as possible' scenario in SC so cap the framerate at something like 120. The other is basically constantly feed the card as much data as possible (some beta builds of STO and early release had this problem), that was basically a problem of not being able to fit a whole area/level in memory, or not wanting to cause a load screen, so you're maxing out your bandwidth to push data to the card, while at the same time letting the player fly around and shoot stuff (and said stuff shoot back). One of the things here is to do a better job of controlling what's being sent to the card in the first place (BSP trees for example). That's a problem that the card will render a scene to look correct even if you treat it badly, so you can sort of plod through development like that, but you shouldn't assume that the uncleaned 3 year old system one of your customers has will be as pristine as your development machines.

      When driving a car you can 'floor it' for a few seconds, but if you left it that way your engine would eventually overheat, if you've ever gotten stuck in the snow or on ice you'll know what I'm talking about. GPU's are similar. When your comp starts or when you do specific things with an application they can run with all of it's parts at full power, but only for a little while. If you do that for too long eventually it will burn out.

    10. Re:Ridiculous. by jdoverholt · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Reminds me of this video from Tom's Hardware, circa 2001.

    11. Re:Ridiculous. by surgen · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    12. Re:Ridiculous. by sjames · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  2. read: StarCraft will expose your crappy setup by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:read: StarCraft will expose your crappy setup by RogueyWon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  3. Uhh... by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Might explain my crashes by The+Barking+Dog · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

  5. Re:Not sure I get the reasoning here by Dragoniz3r · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Already dead by KirstuNael · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  7. game was crashing for me by j0nb0y · · Score: 4, Informative

    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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  8. Seriously..? by Fusione · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  9. What year is this? by Sir+Lollerskates · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  10. Even if its true... by Richard_at_work · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

  11. more than crash... damage by Speare · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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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    1. Re:more than crash... damage by rotide · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  12. Short answer: No by mike2R · · Score: 5, Funny

    Long answer: NOOOoooooooooooooooo!!!!!

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  13. Mindless, driveling sensationalism by Nimey · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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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  14. My guess? Users need to STFU by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:My guess? Users need to STFU by the_other_chewey · · Score: 5, Funny

      Their PSU is inadequate for their card. High end graphics cards need a lot of voltage on the 12v rail.

      I'd say they need 12V of voltage on the 12V rail...

  15. Re:Not sure I get the reasoning here by crossmr · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  16. Don't make car analogies if you don't understand by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  17. Evil Giant Killer Dust Bunnies From Hell by davidwr · · Score: 4, Informative

    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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  18. The Fix by Pawnn · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  19. Re:This is because StarCraft II is correctly writt by 19thNervousBreakdown · · Score: 3, Informative

    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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  20. Re:wow! what card?, and then I realized by vadim_t · · Score: 4, Informative

    glxgears isn't a benchmark. Its only point is to verify that "yep, 3D acceleration is working" on a very basic level. And even that isn't working that well now that it's possible to run it at high speeds in software.

  21. This is this way the entire game by vitaflo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  22. Parent is insightful. by eddy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    Belief is the currency of delusion.
    1. Re:Parent is insightful. by fishbowl · · Score: 5, Insightful

      >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.

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    2. Re:Parent is insightful. by Fjandr · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.