Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind

For those of that have been playing StarCraft 2 for the past few weeks since the release, you might have noticed that your GPU is overheating due to a game engine problem.

Although the solution to it is quite simple and can be found in many places ( including bottom of this post ) I have decided to go and explain the problem, and not just the solution.

Lets first explain how a graphics engine works ( super high level ) :

• once all graphics are loaded to the graphics card memory, the math/physics engine is then able to start drawing the frame. given all inputs from the game engine and the scene.
• The frame is then being calculated based on the scene and objects, and at the end its being drawn on the screen.
• Obviously some cards are fasted and can draw frames at a much higher frame rate… but that means that the game will be out of sync, or will be really fast, so there is a time axis synchronization on the top of it. so if your computer’s GPU is slow, you will play at the same rate, but will see less frames, or less of a smooth movement.

The Problem :

In StarCraft 2, the game has no frame limit by nature, which is very noticeable in the game’s Menus and empty terrains with no/few units …

What happens is that the GPU has all of the graphics, but has nearly no calculations to make in order to build the frame to draw, so it can draw a lot more frames in less time, which just heats the GPU and may cause black screens/crashes of the system.

The Fix :

Blizzard the magnificent who already got lots of questions from its customers, has offered a solution, which is to edit the “Documents'\StarCraft II\Variables.txt” file and add the two following lines :

frameratecap=60
frameratecapGlue=30

This effectively adds a frame rate limiter to the game, and holds it from drawing too many frames, if you got a strong GPU, you may want to adjust the values up a notch. Thanks Blizzard, GG.

Labels: solution, starcraft

Posted by barry on Saturday, August 07, 2010 at 3:08 PM | Link