Question about DDO Game Engine

[josh.c]

My question is: Is it bad, or does it hurt anything if I turn the game engine down to High instead of Very high and continue playing with it on High? Now that is the question, here is my story.

This game seems to make my GPU work really hard. It has temperatures of about 80-90C when running on the very lowest settings. I have a radeon hd 4850. (which i've heard already run hot) I was planning on buying a cooler for it, so I could turn the settings up higher in DDO since I know it can handle more than the very lowest. I can turn the graphics up on other new games and the temps on my GPU never reached as high as they have while playing DDO even at the very lowest settings. I decided to go to troubleshooting and turned the game engine down from very high, to high. By doing this, not only am I able to turn my graphics from very low, to ultra high..but my temps are down to 70 degrees celsius while they used to be over 90, sometimes 100. If I tried turning my graphics on ultra high when the engine is on very high. my gpu would eventually overheat and my pc would shut down. Now, when the engine is on high, I do notice that it is not as smooth as it normally is on very high, but it's not very noticeable. It seems weird that by turning down the game engine from very high to high has made such a tremendous impact on the way my pc runs DDO.

[Visty]

well, if you want high qualityy and uber looking things, then you have to keep it high
but then your performance is lacking

imo even on medium settings the game is still **** nice, i personally even play only on the lowest setting cause of the performance and it still looks better then other games out there

[josh.c]

Thanks for the quick reply. I guess I don't really want things to look uber, but more so I would want my GPU's temperature to not reach such a high temp even when the settings are on the very lowest. I guess by trading a tiny bit of performance to reduce my GPU temps from being 90+ down to 70, then thats what I should do. A plus side of it is that now I can max my graphics and STILL drop the temperature of my GPU. You're right though, the graphics aren't that bad even as you scale down. Maybe I can further reduce the temperature by scaling the graphics down a couple notches so it both looks good, and isn't cooking my GPU. I was just concerned with running the game with the game engine on high. where it is very high on default. I was not certain if changing these settings was just for troubleshooting a problem, or if you could change it as you see fit.

[itsameabob]

Try downloading a fan controller and manually adjusting the fan settings on your graphics card. The card itself may not be speeding up when temperatures raise. I'm not very sure about Radeon Graphics cards, as I've always used Nvidia myself, but I have that particular issue with my card.

[josh.c]

Sorry. I should have posted more details, but I'm not very computer literate. I have my catalyst control center set my fan speed manually. I used to run my fans at 60% but the card still got too hot. I now run my fans at 80% and it's a little better. I heard it's not bad to run the fans at 100%? Not sure if it's wise to keep them that high all the time, then the fan would eventually fail? What it boils down to is:

game engine : very high
graphics settings: lowest
GPU temperature: 90 sometimes near 100 celsius
fan speed: 80%

game engine : high
graphics settings: ultra high
GPU temperature: 70
fan speed: 80%

seems like the way to go is to keep the engine on high. I don't mind the performance hit because I don't notice it so much when playing and it seems like it's better for my hardware? This is assuming changing the game engine from it's default setting is okay.

[sirdanile]

I have noticed that in this game dropping graphics quality down is barely noticeable, even between low and very high.

[josh.c]

So I'm clear, it's okay to turn the ddo game engine down to High from Very High without causing problems?