StarCraft II Causing Graphics Cards to Overheat?

[Rob Williams]

StarCraft II was launched last week to much fanfare, and though I haven't heard of any sales figures yet, the game seems to be well-received so far. Well, for those who can play it without their graphics card overheating, that is. Yes, it seems that even the biggest games on the planet can ship with show-stopping bugs, but whether this one is Blizzard's fault or not is really for you to decide.

Read the rest of our post and discuss it here!

 

[Doomsday]

playing the hell out of this game! didnot have the aforementioned problem but i edited the text file anyways!

Happy gaming!

 

[Greg King]

Black Andy has had issues with his install. He continued to get BSODs in Windows 7. I suggested that he update his video drivers and I think that has remedied the problems. I haven't heard from him concerning the overheating but I can certainly see the system crashing if the video card was getting too hot.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

Unless a game can overclock/overvolt your GPU, then no, this isn't software related, but driver and Hardware related. It happens with every game release, someone somewhere will loose a card while playing a game, then immediately blame the game for it. Ironically, I lost my Nvidia based GPU while playing a Beta a couple years back. I guess people loose all logic in anger when hardware fails.

A GPU is most likely to fail under load... what puts it under load...? Yup, blame the game for telling your GPU to do what it was designed to do...

I've become more accepting of ATI specifically because when the driver fails, it doesn't take the entire computer with it in a BSOD (most of the time), it just resets the driver and sometimes you can just tab back into the game and carry on. Nvidia on the other hand, any problem, any at all, BSOD with nvdisp.dll at the core of it.

 

[BlackAndy]

Sadly, I am still having the issue. I have the latest drivers, and I get about 10-15 minutes of playtime before the moniter gets no signal from the card and I have to manually shut down. That leads me to belive that it is a heat issue.Twice I have seen the BSOD and the memory dump instead of the moniter going off, but that was before I installed the latest driver pack.
I am about to resort to a whole new rig... but that's just because I want one!
-Andy

 

[Greg King]

Sadly, I am still having the issue. I have the latest drivers, and I get about 10-15 minutes of playtime before the moniter gets no signal from the card and I have to manually shut down. That leads me to belive that it is a heat issue.Twice I have seen the BSOD and the memory dump instead of the moniter going off, but that was before I installed the latest driver pack.
I am about to resort to a whole new rig... but that's just because I want one!
-Andy

Dibs on your old parts.

 

[BlackAndy]

Dibs on your old parts.

Do you really think Amy will go for the "I need a new computer" line? I think the purchase of my car may have capped my spending limit for the next few months

 

[Rob Williams]

I just received my copy of SCII this morning, and now I'm scared to install it! Once I do, I'll keep good track of temperatures and the like. Curious if I am even going to run into the issue or not...

Andy, you just need to go ahead and do it. Pretend you won it was a prize or something ;-)

 

[BlackAndy]

When I get home this evening, I am going to try the "fix" from the battle net forum:
"Certain screens make your hardware work pretty hard
Screens that are light on detail may make your system overheat if cooling is overall insufficient. This is because the game has nothing to do so it is primarily just working on drawing the screen very quickly. A temporary workaround is to go to your Documents\StarCraft II\variables.txt file and add these lines:
frameratecapglue=30
frameratecap=60
You may replace these numbers if you want to."
I have never had any cooling issues before with this rig, so I am shocked that this bug causes such a huge issue.

Rob, I'm not sure she'll fall for that, but I might try.

 

[Greg King]

This seems sillier the longer it goes on. I'm interested to see how this "fix" works on your system.

 

[Doomsday]

is it just me or are these problems coming with mostly Nvidia cards?!?

 

[BlackAndy]

Doomsday - yep most problems seem to be on the 8600, 8800, and 260 cards... Blizzard is having users send in copies of the eventlog after the crash to see what might be causing it..
Greg - Just played for 2 straight hours (after adding the FPS lines to the variable txt) with no hiccups what so ever, last night I couldn't play for more than 20 minutes at a time.
Whatever the issue is, it's above my paygrade to understand it, I am just happy to play this RTS as an after work stress release.

 

[Rob Williams]

So, I loaded up SCII last night and I think I found the perfect place to benchmark - the main menu. Would anyone have a problem if I just started FRAPS and let it run there for 30 seconds for the sake of benchmarking?

I heard from NVIDIA yesterday and I was told that the problem doesn't only lie with its cards. The company is still evaluating the issue, but it seems to be more of a software issue rather than an issue that's prone to affecting just NVIDIA cards.

 

[Kougar]

Yeah, the uncapped framerates bug at the menu screen is rather odd, but other than wasting power and generating heat it shouldn't affect stable systems. If a GPU is already borderline, hot, or power starved then it would only take something like this or Furmark or the OCCT burn tool to take the system over the edge.

 

[BlackAndy]

Sorry for the lack of update, but...... The frame rate fix only worked for the first night, then back to the same stability issues came up.
Still no real fix for this issue yet... I have tried every suggestion on both Nvidia's and Blizzard's tech forums to no avail.
For the record, my system has never had any cooling issues, and I don't have issues with any other program.
Greg told me to upgrade my card to an ATI 5870 , but I can't quite shell out $400 to play one game. :yesmad:

 

[Kougar]

BlackAndy, what happens if ya try running FurMark on your GPU for a little while after the temperature ceases to climb and has leveled off?