Grimrock

Grimrock probably makes use of "Pixel Fill Rate". (I have not actually looked so I am just making an assumption)

Your card may need to be good at this, like 6870OC or something, I specifically got it for this sort of game a few years back, lol lol. (most "popular" games, make use of triangles and shaders mostly, so you can't compare them, shaders are different than pure pixel fill)

Can compare cards here...
http://www.gpureview.com/
The NVidias seem to have ok fillrate, but maybe there is a heat thing with them. or maybe it is some subtle thing I don't quite understand.

Some cards may have OK benchmarks but are not able to change as many pixels on the screen or change many at once without some heat.

From memory when I calculated it a few years ago anything with 9,000 or 10,000 MPixels/sec should be able to process a whole screen of pixels 60 times a second @ 1080p with some overlays and a bit of Sin,Cos and Tan and the normal optimizations.

I should add that I don't really know this stuff (in that what the exact difference is and what the optimizations are), so take my calcs with a grain of salt. Maybe someone could explain better. My understanding is though that modern video cards are good at shading and filling triangles and moving them, but this sort of game is probably also moving pictures of things or bitmaps, so when you move the screen, it really has to be able to crank it. Ironically some older cards were designed to do this more than newer cards and for example your onboard GPU may even be better in some cases than your discrete GPU for some of the work this game does. Personally I have always preferred this sort of game ;oP

stage wrote:Hi. Can some of you use program like Dxtory and limit their max frames to like 60 and tell if that helps with the overheating problem? Quite interesting for me to know if it did.

I tried it.

The fan still kicked on really quick and my computer started getting hot.

ok ty for reply
(can you see the exact Temperature difference with limit and without if you have time to test - i know it might not solve all of your problems but i am personally interested how much it helps, and hopefully enough to make game playable)

I'm having the same issue, my PC just crashed with the screen going nuts - exactly the same way my screen went nuts when my last graphics card died (Alltough a cold reset fixed the problem).
I'm running a GTX 460, vsync and framelimiter on, but the graphics card still gets very hot after playing for an hour or so. The issue seems to be limited to LoG, extended Battlefield 3, Old Republic and Skyrim session don't create the same amount of heat as LoG does. It puts a bit of damper on my GotY. :/

cant believe people are worrying over a video card hitting mid 70's!!

ok chaps try this:
download Furmark
http://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/fur/
stress test your video cards on something like the 720 test at full screen or the 1080 preset test
for exemplar my cards...a 550ti and a 560ti both run to about 75 to 78 degrees on that test!
and that temp is well within limits of the card...your going to experience issues above and beyond 90...but you shouldnt be seeing issues at anything less than that!

if you are you need to disable any overclocking your using
whilst the furmark test is running you need to be looking out for white pixels or texture corruption..if you start to see those then your card is heat damaged and failing under stress.

ive tested LOG on two systems...an i5 with a 550ti...and an i3 with a 560ti
both will hammer the card heavily with vsync turned off..but have happily run the game with no crashes for a good couple of hours....and even then they didnt crash; i just stopped playing!

as long as your fans are clean and you havent overclocked your cards then there is no reason that a video card wont run at full temp for hours on end without issues.

To enable vsync make damn sure you dont have any vsyn overrides in place in your drivers...if need be perform a "factory reset" on your drivers to ensure you havnt tweaked in any odd settings that you have forgotten about.
both Nvidia and ATi have factory restore options..use that and then manually double check you havent forced Vsync or disabled it etc.

This game forced me to disassemble and clean out GPU fan

ok further testing on my rig..(the i5/550ti one)
runing game windows at 1650 for the last 30 mins whilst fiddling in other windows etc and GPU temp hasnt yet reached above 80 degrees...which is well within cooling limits of even the standard cards out there..let alone factory overclocked variations!

running same test with "wait for vsync" turned on dropped standard gpu temps down between 5 and 10 degrees.

conclusion?
whilst not having vsync enabled on will certainly hammer you gpu and "might" cause more heat than usual...a standard card shouldnt be effected by long use at such and even so it would seem the increase is only within 10-15 degrees...

from this test id conclude a couple of things...people need to get their aero dusters out and clean their GPU fans! and people also need to reduce over clocking tweaks if they have them enabled

yes the game will hit your GPU if you dont enable vsync...but nothing extraordinary or GPU killing so far has become apparent.....

Enabling vsync didn't seem to do anything for me. I went from 54C at idle to 89C on my Nvidia GTX470 GPU per GPU-Z in about 5 minutes - a 35C increase. It's not dust in my case or video card fans either - both are clean and I don't overclock. I have a Coolermaster HAF922 case that has a great airflow for cooling.

This is the only game that exhibits this behavior. Just in Steam alone, I have 144 installed games and had never heard the GPU fans ramp up until playing Grimrock. I am hoping that the upcoming patch will address this. It seems to level out about 86-91C and doesn't go any higher, but I am still not wanting to run that hot for too long.

***EDIT*** Ok, enabling vsync does make the GPU Load in GPU-Z much lower, though I cant see where it has affected temperatures. I was still peaking in the high 80s no matter if vsync was enabled or not. That seems strange to me - I would expect a temperature rise corresponding to a high GPU load, but I get the same temps on the reduced load in Grimrock.

Threw on Tbuffering. It still runs hot but will not crash. I am not concerned with a little heat as long as it doesnt get up to like 90c.

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.