Black Raven Dragoons

[Highgrade]

Video card go boom.... starcraft critted my desk top video card last night.... time to try and find one on the i-net or learn to play on a laptop...oh and sorry sunder and turus that i had to bail last night. My screen turned into an array of crystal formations and then died... no picture at all.

[MaxRile]

No porblem dude we figured as such. What was a cool thing tho is that Me and T could use your Troops and buildings to do stuff so i left all your stuff to him and just started attacking them head on wile he attacked up there asses =D it was over way to soon after that.

[Zancarius]

I wonder if that whole thing about Starcraft 2 overheating video card was true after all?

(Har har. I don't see how it's possible, TBH, but regardless of the cause that sucked. I'd strongly recommend looking for burst capacitors kinda like this. Newegg has some pretty cheap 9600s and 250s.)

[Grimblast]

Leaky Caps! (Inter office joke down here)

[Tirian]

Stardock's new game, Elemental, was actually frying video cards in a late alpha/early beta release when people would run with settings turned down -- or so the company reported. They had to put in an automatic governor to keep the game below a certain number of FPS (user-specified).

Sorry to hear about your video card HG!

[Zancarius]

Stardock's new game, Elemental, was actually frying video cards in a late alpha/early beta release when people would run with settings turned down -- or so the company reported. They had to put in an automatic governor to keep the game below a certain number of FPS (user-specified).

Sorry to hear about your video card HG!

The problem occurs typically in games where they're using a 2D surface drawing, so the card tries to draw it as quickly as possible. It's roughly equivalent to doing something akin to:

Code: Select all

while(true) { }

Only with slightly more work. And, well, CPUs are general purpose computing devices so they're not usually susceptible to the problem. The "governor" used is typically a framerate cap that you can set in the API which is why it's easy for the user to specify the max frame rate and why there's not really that much extra work.

Now, most video cards shouldn't ever suffer from the problem, but whenever there are some that may not be adequately cooled, hitting them with something that effectively pegs the GPU for the duration you're sitting in a menu screen or whatnot may cause problems. Though, I still think it's debatable whether or not that really does happen (if pegging the GPU without a frame cap burned it out, chances are it was going to burn out eventually anyway).