That is something I can agree with. I have to add something from myself though:Kirisute wrote:download Furmark from my post above and run the benchmark tests and see if that locks your system; or you start to experience pixel errors or textures errors etcPatchumz wrote:With Triple Buffering on, I can stop Grimrock from locking up my entire system, without it on after a couple minutes it'll just nuke the whole thing. That said, if I have Triple Buffering on and run too many intensive programs, it also locks up my system. Now, this is a problem because I have PLENTY of other things that can push my system like this, to the point of moving at a crawl if I run too much, but NEVER has something caused my system to lock up like this.
So it's definitely a fault in the game, not just a hardware problem.
People need to get out of the mindset that just because a system runs one program correctly it will run another the same way!
Its rubbish!
even if two games are programmed using the same game engine chances are the designers have recoded portions or accessed different ways of creating visual effects which will change how the games play on the same system!
the ONLY thing you can conclude by a system running (for exemplar) battlefield 3 and not crashing is that "in general" its a stable system.
what you dont see is that battlefield 3 might not access memory areas on the video card in the same way as LOG, it might not use the same technology, might not stream pixels the same way...any number of variations that might cause crashing that you might not always see in other applications.
Because LOG can hit your GPU hard it might be exposing underlying issues that other system software just hasnt exposed!
benchmarking with Furmark will burn your GPU good and i promise you if its going to lock up under stress than the benchmarks in furmark will cause it to do so!
for extra stress testing try unigine heaven:
http://unigine.com/products/heaven/
Heaven is great for stress testing overclocking as it will very quickly display white pixels of texture corruption if youve overclocked your card too much.....hitting higher settings and enabling tessalation (if you run Windows 7) will also hammer your card for a decent stress test.
remember LOG isnt a standard 2d dungeon crawler..its actually a fully fledged 3d enviroment (right clicking and holding your mouse and looking around will prove that) so it will be using alot of gpu power even though its not flashing fancy effects all over the place!
again...stress test with Furmark or Heaven and post your temp results....
Furmark failed me once. I was overclocking my graphics card and tests done with Furmark went all OK: the temperatures were in acceptable boundaries, there were no artifacts and the system was stable. However, everytime I launched "Rainbow Six: Vegas 2" and went to one specific spot on one specific map the entire system immediatelly blue-screened. I could reproduce this every time and it only stopped happening once I lowered the overclocking parameters. So I have to say that Furmark is not 100% reliable.
On Grimrock:
The game also raised the temperatures on my GPU to unusally high values - up to the point when the fans became noisy. But my system didn't crash/blue-screen/freeze/lock-up/do whatever when that happened and it never does. I could still play the game normally and I only noticed the noise from the fans when I put away my headphones. The temperature issue was fixed when I enabled vertical sync in the game menus.
When you buy PC equipment it is not a matter of purchasing the highest possible parameters for the lowest possible amount of cash. It's an investment. It pays off not to skimp.
Long story short:
When your entire system locks up, shutdowns or goes to a blue screen when you're playing a game it's never the game's fault. The culprit is always one, or a combination, of following: faulty hardware, insufficient cooling, faulty drivers, non-updated BIOS or a non-updated operating system.