I’ve mentioned my video card struggles before. It’s been a constant source of low-grade annoyance that I haven’t been able to use my card to its full capacity, but at least I found a way to allow myself to play. Last night, though, even with underclocking I still had restarts just looking at the main menu screen in Starcraft 2.
Let’s not get off on the subject of why I was playing Starcraft 2 rather than working on my interactive fiction game — I’m saving that for a self-flagellating post later. But once this problem started happening, I really wanted to figure out what the deal was, so I hit up Google and started browsing.
Some people had power issues, and that seemed plausible. After all, it required some gyrations to get the card up and running in the first place. Some people blamed heat, but when checking the card temps it just didn’t seem that high. But then I found another article that finally got me looking in the right direction.
Apparently my model of video card has a feature where it automatically shifts the clock speed of the card between 500 MHz and 750 MHz depending on what you’re trying to do with it. I don’t know all the details, but apparently 3D games under Windows 7 can confuse the card and get it to try to shift modes back and forth repeatedly, which causes the fan to go nuts and the card to eventually trigger a system shutdown.
The suggested fix for this was to lock the GPU to 750 MHz using an overclocking tool. I downloaded RivaTune, followed the simple instructions for setting this up, and was rewarded with a card that runs stably (and quietly) at full rated clock speed. Sure, it probably eats a bit more power just idling at the desktop, but it’s worth it to not have to worry about random reboots any more!
#1 by Eric on August 12, 2010 - 11:48 am
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Hmm…That is probably why turning down my video settings cured my cutscene crash problem. However there was an article on slashdot that claimed that blizzard did not cap the frame rate at 60 and since most of the cutscenes are fairly static the video card would keep running at higher and higher frame rates until it would shut down to protect the card. In any event, the game seems to run fine for me now and the lower setting seems negligible in terms of quality.
#2 by Matt Wigdahl on August 12, 2010 - 4:43 pm
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Could be, although that doesn’t sound right to me. If framerate isn’t capped by the software, it should be capped by the GPU, and all that should happen is that you really run the fan. I guess if you had poor heatsinking on the card you could have problems, but in that case you’d probably have run into problems anyway.
At any rate, glad it’s working for you! What do you think of the game so far?
#3 by Eric on August 13, 2010 - 12:37 pm
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I like it fine, seems to be a typical Blizzard product i.e. it takes a well worn form and then polishes it. The achievements would seem to me to be a little much since you can’t brag on them like wow, but as someone in wow once said “Achievements are for mouth breathers.”.
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