Graphics card getting overworked?

[voidholder]

Hi,

I have a Radeon 4870 graphics card, and I've noticed that having DDO open causes its fans to speed up to probably maximum speed, causing a lot of unwanted noise. I have only ran DDO in full screen mode so not sure if the same happens as windowed. However, if I alt-tab out of the game the fans slow down almost instantly.

Is this normal? This happens even when I'm facing a wall and nothing in the game moves. Somehow I'd think that the game should put strain on the graphics card only when displaying some new infromation, not with a static screen...

Any particular graphics setting that might be tweaked? I am running on maximum settings and have no lag problems at all. I have not noticed the same "overdrive" happening with other games, which leads me to think it is not a feature of the card, but something to do with the game.

Thanks in advance for any insight!

[Maxelcat]

lower your settings.

as your card heats up, the fans will get faster. DDO is a very pretty game on max settings but all that pretty is a lot of work.

Personally, I keep the draw distance up, but the details down.

[voidholder]

I guess I could try to experiment which setting causes this amount of work for to graphics card even if nothing moves on the screen... I was just thinking that a static picture should not cause workload on the GPU despite the amount of details?

[Lorichie]

All i can do is tell you my tale....

about 18 months ago, my then new computer had quad core cpu, 4 gig ram, 8800gt graphics card. she purred like a kitten playing ddo and life was good....

now, 18 months later, many updates to the game later, and the game is much much more resource intensive than it used to be, much more than it says it is. Now i keep the graphics card fan on almost all the time to keep it cooler to run better.

(It's very likely my card is going. She's worked very hard these last 18 months and as hard as i worked her, she's more than given me my money back.)

Its entirely possible your little 4870 is really needing a nap...but again, i'm fairly ignorant on computer stuff, i just simply relate what has happened to me and you take it as you will.

R

[voidholder]

Could naturally be a hardware feature, too. Something like it automatically boosts the GPU fans when GPU memory is used for anything...

Was mainly thinking if it is normal for a web based game to constantly send data to GPU even if nothing on my screen moves?

[Lundivar]

To help with Temps I put a max FPS of 60 to 65 so I can stay (mostly) above 60FPS, any faster is wasted really unless you're running 120mhz in 3D I guess. You could also put 30 FPS on a system which does not reach 60 FPS.

See this thread on temperatures : http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=216042

The game textures are mostly pretty, but the polygon count is fairly low and simple (from what I can observe), dating back a number of years to the original development. (How & if the devs will increase that with DX11 implementation is intriguing to me).

Getting back to the original point decreasing your max FPS should help temps, but I still think there are other issues with their graphics engine. (Read : Loops which waste GPU cycles, can't prove without looking at code, but there are too many people with this issue).

Hope it helps.

L.

[Strakeln]

Yep, DDO runs hot as hell. I fried my pair of 8800GTs almost a year ago, and the load has only gotten heavier since then.

I now run a GTX 285 with 2GB of VRAM... and it still gets up to 75 C when playing (and I always play with the fan set to 85%). Granted, my display size is huge (2560x1600), so that much stress on a monster card is still not all that big of a surprise.

One of the installation instructions for DDO should be to set your GPU fan to 70% or higher.