Grimrock

You're overlooking the fact that "HotGPU" immediately presumes that the devs are careless and everyone here is equally ignorant.

His concerns may well have been better received had he broached the subject in a more tactful manner. Oh wait, they were - by a DEV, no less. What Petri said is as good and as accurate advice as you can hope for.

Zero wrote:What Petri said is as good and as accurate advice as you can hope for.

Agreed. So there is no need for the ridicule and superior attitude. Problem solved.

petri wrote:

HotGPU wrote:I'm sad they haven't seemingly acknowledged or attempted to warn and protect their customers against this.

This is more important than them working on a level editor etc. This fault in their software potentially will damage users machines and they must fix it.

There is no "fault in the software" that causes overheating. With 1.1.4 vsync is turned on by default for new users and we even added a frame rate limiter - you can set max frame rate by editing the config file manually if you wish. I don't think there's more we can do. If your temperatures are still rising please check the following:

1) make sure that vertical sync is not forced off in your graphics card driver settings
2) make sure that vertical sync is turned on in Grimrock's graphics settings (accessible from main menu)
3) try lowering the graphics quality settings and/or display resolution from game's settings
4) make sure your system is properly cooled

Thanks for your reply Petri and I had previously checked all of your points after the last patch. I've just come back to try this again after waiting to see if this had been resolved by now. After my laptop previously overheated I had it serviced and checked and everything was fine. After previously asking how to specify the max frame rate in the CFG and not getting a response and being unable to find the answer via google it now seems from searching just today I need to put something like the following in the CFG file:

maxFrameRate = 60

Which I have done now and playing the game again now the temperature is up over 90 degrees (Much higher than Crysis, Crysis 2, and similar after hours of play) and climbing in the very first room so I had to shut it down in case it overheated again. Is this game really more graphics intensive than Crysis and similarly visually high end titles? If so that is really quite impressive.

I will try again with lower settings but if that doesn't work then I will check again in a few months time if anything has been identified as a problem and fixed else I look forward a few years when laptop technology has caught up enough to play the game in its full glory as given all the glowing reviews I definitely want to play it properly one day

Phlimm wrote:Even if the OP is uninformed, this issue is important to him. I have had issues similar to this. I had no idea I could limit the frame rate with config file. How about a little publicity on that?

Also the little cutesy comments, "funny" pictures, insults and degrading "Ha ha, I know more about computers that you do" attitude from several users in the forum REALLY do a disservice to this great game. It really does not help when someone has an issue that they want addressed. All it does is make the devs look like they condone the bad behavior and make people not want to come back here.

Some one with some common sense thank you.

zalewapl wrote:

Phlimm wrote:Also the little cutesy comments, "funny" pictures, insults and degrading "Ha ha, I know more about computers that you do" attitude from several users in the forum REALLY do a disservice to this great game. It really does not help when someone has an issue that they want addressed. All it does is make the devs look like they condone the bad behavior and make people not want to come back here.

This was caused mainly by the HotGPU's inability to use the search function. This topic has been beaten to death on these forums. Then again, maybe it would be good to create a sticky FAQ topic in this subforum where this topic would be covered. I think it would reduce the frequency with which this particular problem comes up, and if such threads appear then they could be resolved by simply copypasting a link to the correct thread.

Phlimm wrote:"Ha ha, I know more about computers that you do"

It's highly probable that this is actually an objective fact.

"This was caused mainly by the HotGPU's inability to use the search function"

...er nope but thanks for your help anyway.

Have a nice day

Zero wrote:

HotGPU wrote:I'm sad they haven't seemingly acknowledged or attempted to warn and protect their customers against this.

This is more important than them working on a level editor etc. This fault in their software potentially will damage users machines and they must fix it.

I won't dare play this game until they have patched it again to fix this problem. If it isn't sorted in a few months I will ask for a full refund.

Please fix it.

It always amuses me how the uninformed can have so much conviction.

Clean the furballs out of your computer, stupid.

You just ooze charm charm. Thanks for your help.

Zero wrote:You're overlooking the fact that "HotGPU" immediately presumes that the devs are careless and everyone here is equally ignorant.

His concerns may well have been better received had he broached the subject in a more tactful manner. Oh wait, they were - by a DEV, no less. What Petri said is as good and as accurate advice as you can hope for.

No you are overlooking the fact that you just made up a complete fabrication of what I 'presumed' in your own mind.

I don't think the Dev's are ignorant at all but I think you might be. At the time it was quite possible they weren't aware of the severity of this problem and after a quick internet search it was made obvious I wasn't the only one experiencing the problem still after the patch - and there was no seeming response to that which was frustrating.

Also from the sound of things it seems like you are not the one who can teach anyone about tact.

To the Dev's if my posts came across hostile I apologise but it really wasn't meant like that, and it's not the way I read or wrote it even though I was understandably disappointed the game was having issues on my machine.

From my point of view I thought there was a genuine concern the overheating could damage many peoples computers which is no good for anyone.

HotGPU wrote:Which I have done now and playing the game again now the temperature is up over 90 degrees

How did you verify that it's your GPU (not CPU) that's getting hot? There's a lot of Lua code running in LoG which could be stressing low end CPUs a lot... what are your system specs?

EDIT: What happens if you set max frame rate to 10, do you still get heating? And can you verify that frame rate limited is working, i.e. the frame rate should get choppy if you lower it too much?

petri wrote:

HotGPU wrote:Which I have done now and playing the game again now the temperature is up over 90 degrees

How did you verify that it's your GPU (not CPU) that's getting hot? There's a lot of Lua code running in LoG which could be stressing low end CPUs a lot... what are your system specs?

EDIT: What happens if you set max frame rate to 10, do you still get heating? And can you verify that frame rate limited is working, i.e. the frame rate should get choppy if you lower it too much?

I was getting curious what is this fuzz all about the overheating of systems with LOG. So I was measureing it for my system, a somewhat outdated AMD athlon x2 240 with a ATI HD3600 (approx. 2007).
First, I'm technical very impressed what Almost Human was able to squeeze out of my old system, I was able to finish LOG (and also the last level, only a little bit "sluggish") with an acceptable framerate for me, almost everywhere in the game (not measured but felt > 15FPS). My setup was a resolution of 1280x960 and shadows qual -1, rest of settings max, vsync on, v1.1.4 so framerate limiter was enabled.

Here are some artifical benchmark situation to measure the grimrock engine load on the GPU, whcih I hope are somehat a representative selection. I was trying to get the complete dynamic: most demanding settings & situation to the most simple situation and graphical settings (but was keeping resolution fixed):

• pillar of light room with 6 torches (5 in sockets one in hand), max settings (1280x960): 10 fps , GPU load 100%, GPU-temp 91C°
  http://i48.tinypic.com/2uzbhog.jpg
• pillar of light room with 6 torches (5 in sockets one in hand), min settings (1280x960): 19fps , GPU load 100%, GPU-temp 91C°
  http://i45.tinypic.com/309qwox.jpg
• pillar of light room with 0 light sources & minimized field of view: max settings (1280x960): 22 fps , GPU load 100%, GPU-temp 89C°
  http://i49.tinypic.com/2dr7yis.jpg
• pillar of light room with 0 light sources & minimized field of view: min settings (1280x960): 37 fps , GPU load 100%, GPU-temp 89C°
  http://i50.tinypic.com/2hpnk8o.jpg

Tests with Fallout 3 as most demanding game (beside LOG) I posses, for comparision. settings: 1024x786 , medium or high settings (AA disabled)

• Fallout 3 normal situation: 23fps, GPU load 100%, GPU-temp 91C°
  http://i50.tinypic.com/2d26nt3.jpg
• Fallout 3 looking on wall (minimal burden): 60fps, GPU load 51%, GPU-temp 78C°
  http://i48.tinypic.com/mres5h.jpg

conclusion:
As you can see on the screenhots in GPU-Z my graphic card is always 100% load and pretty hot with LOG.
1 CPU core seems maxed all the time(is LOG single threaded?) but no temperature problem there.

Comparision with Fallout 3, my GPU reaches with this different engine/game a similar maximum temperature on 100% GPU load, so nothing faulty or special on LOG to detect here. But also, LOG seems not to scale down enough on simple settings or game situations, in Fallout 3 I was able to achieve <100% GPU load, which I was unable to achieve in LOG.

I was also surprised by the small dynamic and influence on the FPS between lowest and highest graphical settings in LOG, I expected a bigger dynamic in FPS here. There seems not be enough and effective settings for reducing the burden on the GPU (and therefore temperature), most effective option seems resolution but this can not be set below 1028x786. (Was also trying to enforce for curiosity 640x480 and 320x240 by cfg, which was working & looking great, but there were major issues with menues and font sizes....) Maybe there is also a problem with the light source quality reduction on lowest settings, the torch looks the same on highest and lowest setting.

As the LOG framerate is always < 60 fps even in the simplest situation and setting, the often hinted vsync, framerate limiter and quality settings are ineffective approaches in limiting the GPU burden and therefore temperature of GPUs for older and slower GPU cards (at least for mine one, but I guess this conclusions can be drawn for other not up-to-date GPU systems, too).

Solution approaches might be the introduction of other and more quality settings which would allow to reduce the GPU burden more significantly for older cards, also allowing and supporting lower resolution than 1024x786 could help too. (also useful for Laptops & integrated GPU systems)

PS: some pics of the 640x480 tests

GPU load drops to 80% in 640x480 in even the highest quality setting sometimes, but sadly some font glitches (and mode seems to be not setable to fullscreen, which limits the usefulness significantly)

most problematic situation in 640x480, option menu is not scrollable, also not by mouse wheel (unlike the load and save menu)
PPS: some funky 320x200 tests... LOG is almost ready for mobile devices

@Badhabit Are you running x64 or x32 version of Windows? This plays a big roll in how the system addresses multicore use. x64 will use a multicore more efficiently but remember that LoG is only a x32 game (unless I missed something) so by nature it is single core even if a 64bit OS is multi-threading the game across multiple cores. It hits all 4 cores on my system.

As for over heating... on a GeForce GTX 460 I'm only averaging 68% load sat at 1280x1024 and vsync off, everything else maxed.

system specs:
AMD A6-3620APU
GeForce GTX 460
8Gb Ram
2Tb Sata 3 HardDrive
Windows 7 Pro x64 uEFI