Is Starcraft 2 causing your gaming rig or laptop to overheat? Well, you may be able to cool that blazing system down with just two simple lines of code.
“Certain screens make your hardware work pretty hard. [For example], screens that are light on detail may make your system overheat if cooling is overall insufficient,” Blizzard rep “Martyt” wrote in an official Starcraft 2 forum post.
“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 DocumentsStarCraft IIvariables.txt file and add these lines:
frameratecapglue=30
frameratecap=60
You may replace these numbers if you want to.”
Meanwhile, John Gillooly of PC Authority pointed out that the between-mission scenes – such as those onboard Jim Raynor’s ship – weren’t properly framerate capped.
“These are fairly static scenes and don’t take much work for the graphics card to display them. [But] because of this, the card renders the scene as quickly as possible, which then taxes your card as it works to its full potential,” explained Gillooly.
“[Yes], it may sound illogical, but redrawing the same image over and over again can put just as much stress on a graphics processor as running a game like Crysis with everything cranked up. As the pipelines within your graphics card work overtime, the card will heat up and if it can’t cope with that heat it will crash.”
However, Gillooly noted that graphics card manufacturers typically designed cooling around certain reference temperatures.
“If a card runs hotter than it should, it will throttle back speed or shut down completely to avoid damage. Where this can become a problem is when cooling isn’t as efficient as it could be and the graphics card shuts down prematurely.
“Still, the most common cause of overheating is dust. If your computer is designed properly it sucks air in through the front of the case and expels it from the rear and/or the top. With that air comes dust, which builds up inside your case.”
As such, Gillooly recommended users routinely open and clean their rig cases with a can of compressed air.
“Once you are rid of [the dust] you’ll notice things running a lot smoother…[But this] isn’t a failsafe solution – sometimes overheating is just a sign that the product is old and worn out – a fan cannot spin forever after all,” he added.
