Is StarCraft II Killing Graphics Cards?

An anonymous reader writes "One of the more curious trends emerging from last week's StarCraft II launch is people alleging that the game kills graphics cards.The between-mission scenes onboard Jim Raynor's ship aren't framerate capped. These are fairly static scenes, and don't take much work for the graphics card to display them. Because of this, the card renders the scene as quickly as possible, which then taxes your graphics card as it works to its full potential. As the pipelines within your graphics card work overtime, the card will heat up and if it can't cope with that heat it will crash."

Comments

Ridiculous.

[Mr EdgEy]

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.

Re:Ridiculous.

[Andy Dodd]

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.

Re:Ridiculous.

[V!NCENT]

$ 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...

Re:Ridiculous.

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Ridiculous.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Ridiculous.

[bertok]

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.

Re:Ridiculous.

[surgen]

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.

read: StarCraft will expose your crappy setup

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:read: StarCraft will expose your crappy setup

[RogueyWon]

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.

Uhh...

[The MAZZTer]

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.

Might explain my crashes

[The Barking Dog]

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).

Re:Not sure I get the reasoning here

[Dragoniz3r]

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.

Seriously..?

[Fusione]

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.

What year is this?

[Sir Lollerskates]

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.

Even if its true...

[Richard_at_work]

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...

Short answer: No

[mike2R]

Long answer: NOOOoooooooooooooooo!!!!!

My guess? Users need to STFU

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:My guess? Users need to STFU

[the_other_chewey]

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...

Re:Not sure I get the reasoning here

[crossmr]

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

Don't make car analogies if you don't understand

[Sycraft-fu]

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 Fix

[Pawnn]

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.

Re:Parent is insightful.

[fishbowl]

>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.