Grimrock

Patchumz 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.

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 etc
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....

Well, you can optimise/balance your engine/shaders in a way that it's less of an issue on more systems.

Of course this needs more development time but as some people are reporting such issues and the game is selling well, it's also something you can expect to be fixed. On a number of notebook GPUs the game tends to crash and i also saw a number of white blocks on several desktop GPUs already.

Several roads are leading to Rome and some are safer than others due to realities on the hardware/driver side.

Fnord wrote:The game is not frame-rated limited. Try turning on Vsync and your issues should go away. Make sure that your graphics card drivers are not set to "force Vsync off).

Once I figured out how to turn on Vsync for my nvidia Geforce NX8600GT all the overheat warnings stopped. I can play the game now. Thanks so much Fnord!

Next patch now has frame limiting options in game, so this should solve the problems for most.

Confirming here, Macbook Pro / Win7 / GT330M; fans are running at full speed all time (however, I didn't face any problems like game/drivers/OS crashing because of that). Didn't try vsync off/tripple buffering yet.

The prison section seems really demanding b/c mt fan is blazing in it.

Patchumz wrote:Next patch now has frame limiting options in game, so this should solve the problems for most.

woot! And thanks!

BTW: How do I know if there's a patch available? Has LoG a built in patching mechanism?

Kirisute wrote: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.

I just wanted to point out that people are saying their cards are reaching around 70c thats Celcius not Fahrenheit which equals about 158f (those of us in america are more used to Fahrenheit and don't realize how much hotter Celsius is at the 70c range) Which seems to me would be more than enough to fry eggs, much less video cards. :p Now you may know this but I thought I would point it out and if you realized it I am sorry, I am the first to admit I don't play around with computers and heating problems anymore, so I don't really know how hot video cards can get with out them having problems.

*Edit: Nope I have no clue about temps on vid cards lol doing some research and found that I am clueless So sorry for my post.

I encountered the same issues decribed in this thread and examined the GPU load a bit further. For monitoring the various temperatures and the GPU load I'm using the tool AIDA64.

When starting to play Grimrock my graphic card (ATI Radeon 4890) were reaching its temperature max in a few minutes - more than 106° Celsius (or more than the temperature to boil water!) at the GPU diode MemIO. The GPU load was measured with _constant_ 99-100 %!

After enabling V-synch the GPU load was reduced to 70-80 % and so was the temperature. Cleaning the vents and removing all dust from within my PC surely helped too.

It seems that Grimrock will max out the graphic hardware no matter what when V-synch is not enabled ...

For reference I'm running a 680GTX in 3d vision mode (double load) at its maxing out at about 69C with vsync on. This is perfectly acceptable.