S.T.A.L.K.E.R. kills my GPU?!?!

[OutrightKain]

Hello,

I just bought Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, and am ATTEMPTING to play it on my Q9550 with HD 4870 1Gb build, but even on the absolute bare minimum graphics settings, it uses at/near 100% gpu and really starts to cook my card. My fps is great, and it plays incredibly smooth, even at maximum the fps does not drop below 70. I have heard so much about this game and would love to play it, but I don't want to start a fire. I am going to just assume that this is similar to the Oblivion problem that I cannot resolve, which is simply that outdated software tries to assassinate newer hardware. Can anyone help me out? Thank you.

 

[xaero1ne]

have you tried playing with vsync on??

 

[swifty_morgan]

Worried about the heat ? It's a hot card alright. A couple of things that will help. Take the side off your case if you don't have adequate ventilation. Second, go into the CCC and under overdrive set the fan speed to manual and set it at 37-40%. It should run quiet enough so the noise won't bother you and the card will stay cooler and at a more steady temperature. Without setting it manually the card waits til it hits 70c before the fan speed picks up and by then there's too much heat to try and get rid of. I've been there. Works great.

 

[OutrightKain]

V. Sync has no effect on the performance hit, it may drop the FPS a few but it doesn't change the load on the GPU. Yes, Swifty, a hot card indeed. I usually leave the fan manually at 30%, and I have a HAF X case so the air flow is dang good, unfortunately I got my card a bit early on and didn't get a redesigned card with an egg cooler, it has the lame refernce design "box" cooler and fan. Having it set on auto-fan, CCC seems to keep it's max temp at 90c and under, which XFX customer support has assured me even low 90's should not harm the card though it is slightly above the standard range. I have been playing Call of Pripyat on max settings and the temp stays around 87, though the game gets a bit skippy when i start running, but that could be ram or even HDD. Also, i don't think I will do it, but you can you suggest a GPU overclocking tool for ATI/XFX, windows 7 and all that? I have seen that MSI has one, i believe, and CCC doesn't let you push it too much. I had my CCC OverDrive set the clocks to 780Mhz core and 1035mhz memory, and maxing those out to 790/1100 actually seemed to affect Call of Pripyat a bit, even at such a small increase.

 

[kyle382]

yeah vsync is not going to help ur temperatures. I have a card that ran wickedly hot until i built a new pc with better ventilation. It was getting around 80-90C at load and now it maxes at around 60....sounds like your case is pretty boss also. I bought a coolermaster sniper, which has a bit 2 much fanning for my needs.

Is your pc room at least at room temperature? crank dat AC up.

 

[sirkillalot]

are all your fan areas clean ???cpu gpu psu .

 

[OutrightKain]

yes everything is in fine condition. The focus of this though is more the fact that the game requires 100% of my GPU on minimum graphics and was wondering if anyone knew how to resolve this, the heat is just a by-product.

 

[kyle382]

oh yeah thats a problem. u require a driver of some sort...additionally this is a question to ask on the stalker forums...im sure they are out there somewhere.

 

[Guest]

So, do other games work ok?

 

[sirkillalot]

the only thing that i can think of from pass experience is update the bios on the motherboard cause i had something similar with my pc and after the update, i had no problem with the games.

 

[Hedgie12345]

I had noise on my NVIDEA GeForce GTX 970 when playing Stalker Shadow Of Chernobyl.
Solution: open NVIDEA Control Panel, Manage 3D Settings, select Program Settings, Select a program to customise, Add Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl, Specify Settings for Vertical Sync, Set to On or Adaptive or Adaptive (half refresh rate). Restart game.
This reduced my GPU 3D usage from 100% to about 38% with maximum graphics settings