CombatHelo Blog (RSS Import)

The slowdown could be caused by your Windows video drivers resetting. Occasionally when I'm running Leadwerks with everything on high, my video card will get very hot and it may stop responding. This causes Windows to reset the video driver, which may show as a quick screen flicker. After this reset, the a temporary driver is loaded until you restart and the real driver is loaded once again. The temporary driver will only give me single digit FPS.

Oh goodness Dave. That's an interesting thought. If that's the case inserting "sleep for 10ms" into the main loop to help keep things cool might help. During long development sessions my room gets pretty warm.

 

Star Trek Online had a fair few users with overheating problems. You can scan their forums for things like "STO killed my PC" or simply "overheating".

 

Cheers Dave

No program should overheat the GPU, ever. The driver should be self-limiting so that the card never gets too hot.

 

I experienced this with some drivers with an nVidia GEForce 9800 GTX. If it continues to be a problem, using Flip(1) can prevent this, but it's really a problem with the driver, and should not be happening.

 

If this does occur, you will know it because the screen will go black and a notification will appear in the system tray saying that the display driver crashed.

I've found that the newest nVidia drivers under Windows 7 are rather subtle about resetting. Previously my screen would flicker or black out for several seconds, but now it flickers and resets so quickly I sometimes don't even notice until I realize that performance has dropped.

 

What Josh says about heat is true though, it shouldn't get to a point where the card is too hot. My problem is more related to overloading my GPU I think (Running Leadwerks, 3ds Max, Crazybump and other apps that use the GPU all at once).

 

Just to make sure that heat isn't an issue, if you have an nVidia card download the EVGA Precision Tool and use it to set your fans at 80 or 90% manually when needed. Sometimes the auto-fan tries to play catch up too much.