Yesterday Geek Native covered the news that StarCraft II had sold more 5 days than StarCraft I ever sold. Today? Today brings the news that StarCraft II may actually be causing some PC’s graphic cards to melt.
The DailyTech picks this up. They’ve the story of Game Informer’s Adam Biessener who sufffered the melty melty effect.
“Three hours of cursing later, I’m posting this from my wife’s laptop because both my graphics card and my work laptop appear to be fried.”
Ouch.
This is a real deal. Blizzard’s already posted on their site about it.
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 Beta\variables.txt file and add these lines:
frameratecapglue=30
frameratecap=60
You may replace these numbers if you want to.
I’m reminded of the early days of computing. Before we had the Facebook’s Poke there was a way to, ahem, cheat in early computer games. You made use of the Poke command to plonk a bit of data into memory. The term “Poke of Death” was used to describe a Poke which broke hardware (you know; trying to spool tape too quickly).
If I’d bought StarCraft II I’d be pretty annoyed. Who wants a game that might destroy their graphic cards? Interestingly but not surprisingly fans are split on the issue. Some are defending Blizzard.
Plewis00, on DailyTech, wrote;
I don’t know if it’s just me who thinks this but surely a piece of software cannot be responsible for a graphics card failure (unless that piece of software stops the fan or something similar)?
If a game is running at an uncapped framerate (I’m sure quite a few games do this anyway) why is that causing a card to burn out? These cards aren’t running beyond spec are they – unless we later find out that these people who reported dead cards also had been overclocking them and have insufficient cooling.
While this is annoying, unless Blizzard does something stupid like auto-overclocks graphics card, modifies fan settings or does something else on a hardware level to modify the card, I don’t see how they can have any real element of blame pinned on them…
What do you think?
