Following reports earlier this week, Blizzard has confirmed that StarCraft II is in fact causing some PCs to overheat.
The problem, described in very basic terms, is that the game engine does not limit the game’s frame rate. This means that your graphics card, as Kokugamer so perfectly put it, “render the s**t” out of certain screens when there is not a lot going on, causing overheating problems.
Essentially, high-end graphics cards will render some screens at hundreds of frames per second, causing them to unnecessarily work at full tilt.
A fix has been detailed, requiring you to change a few lines of code in your StarCraft install directory.
“Screens that are light on detail may make your system overheat if cooling is overall insufficient. 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 Documents\StarCraft II\variables.txt file and add these lines:
frameratecapglue=30
frameratecap=60
You may replace these numbers if you want to.”
Even if StarCraft II does not cause your graphics card to melt, it is probably worth recommending the fix to anyone who doesn’t like their hardware being pushed unnecessarily hard.
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