GeForce GTX 460 overheating while running the game

[S☉larBlade ⊰⑨⊱]

Hello.

I have troubles with running the game... for long than a minute or two. First of all, the game boots and loads just fine, all graphics and sounds seem to be in place properly. In-game options menu reports 48 - 56 FPS, and everything looks smooth. However, after just a half minute of having the game running, I noticed that my graphics cards fans started to work REALLY loudly, unlike I have ever heard before. That obviously meant that my graphics card started working intensively, but it sounded wrong so in fear of damaging it, I shut down Retrovirus quickly.

To make sure I'm not delirious I booted CPUID HWMonitor. While on idle (as in, while not performing any task requiring much GPU work) I get following diagnostics (on average, after long idle):

Voltage: ~ 0.88V
Temperature: ~32 - 40 ºC
Fan: ~1500 - 1600 RPM

Those are general bottom limits of my card, they go with the official diagnostics too. As for Retrovirus, just after mere (roughly twenty) seconds of running it (with default options, borderless window and native resolution), everything starts well... literally boiling, reported diagnostics are (note fan):

Voltage: 1.04V
Temperature: ~ 80 - 86 ºC
Fan: ~ 2700 - 2800 RPM

Considering that 74 ºC is highest "safe" temperature advised for my card, what Retrovirus does to my hardware is distressing.

In comparison, when playing Team Fortress 2 (I know it's technically bad example, but TF2 is game that practically everyone played and everyone can play for comparison for free) with highest settings (minus Texture Detail that is set to "High") on native resolution I get following diagnostics:

Voltage: ~ 0.91 - 1.04V
Temperature: ~ 60 - 70 ºC
Fan: ~ 1500 - 1900 RPM

And here I have a question, what should I do? At such early point I'm not sure whether this is my hardware/software trouble or is it fault of the game itself. Could anyone help me to solve this? Or, if this is game's fault, is there any chance that performance of Retrovirus is going to be... limited to something reasonable? Thanks in advance

= = =
My System Information plus few things I though might be useful:

OS:
Windows 7 Professional (64 bit) + SP 1 + Regular updates of "Windows Update"

CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 970
Vendor: AuthenticAMD
Speed: 3515 Mhz
4 logical processors
4 physical processors
HyperThreading: Unsupported

Memory: DDR3
RAM: 12284 MB

Video Card:
Driver: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460
DirectX Driver Name: nvd3dum.dll
Driver Version: 9.18.13.1106
DirectX Driver Version: 9.18.13.1106
Driver Date: 18 Jan 2013
OpenGL Version: 4.3
Desktop Color Depth: 32 bits per pixel
Monitor Refresh Rate: 60 Hz
DirectX Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460
VendorID: 0x10de
DeviceID: 0xe22
Number of Monitors: 1
Number of Logical Video Cards: 1
No SLI or Crossfire Detected
Primary Display Resolution: 1280 x 1024
Desktop Resolution: 1280 x 1024
Primary Display Size: 17.80" x 14.21" (22.76" diag)
45.2cm x 36.1cm (57.8cm diag)
Primary Bus: PCI Express 16x
Primary VRAM: 1024 MB
Supported MSAA Modes: 2x 4x 8x

[Shadow of Avalar]

I'm not a huge expert or anything, but I have some advise. first you might want to check for dust clogs or anything else inside the computer that might adversly be affecting airflow in the system.

But since the issue seems to be isolated to this game only, it's probably not only that.

To be honest, a GTX460 is a bit on the 'old' side, considering they are currently on the GTX700 series cards. also the second number set (in your case 60) is an indication of the power of the graphics card (allthough these rateings are relative to the card series; a 560 is more powerfull then a 460). today a 60 card is the lowest power manufactured with 80 being the highest. (anything more powerfull is it's own series card, i.e. the Geforce TITAN card) They may introduce a 790, but I haven't heard about it yet.

Basicaly, Retrovirus is (IMO) not terrably optimized in the graphics department and therefore is rather graphics intense. Your probably just pushing your graphics card to the 'edge' of what it can take; this generates a lot of heat, and as a result, your cooling fan is running at max.
You could risk running the game as is, and you MIGHT be fine; typicaly in my experence there are a number of safe-gards in place to prevent you from seriously damageing the card in a short time (allthough all of my experence is with gForce cards made by MSI, other makers may not include some of the safe guards). allthough running it very hard could cause it to slowly break down. It will realy depend on a number of factors, the manufacture of the card, how good of a day the producer was having when they made it, ect..

If you're very worred about it, I would try turning down the graphics, either by lowering the resolution the game runs or turning down the game settings.

if your made of money, you might consider upgradeing the graphics card, but this could be difficult/impossible for some reasons. it would depend on the computer in question.

[S☉larBlade ⊰⑨⊱]

Thank you dearly for response.

I completely dusted off all innards of my computer just recently ago, so I suppose that's not the trouble here, beside as you noted, this is trouble isolated to this game only.

I do realize that my graphics card is not of any high tier anymore but... well, it still does good with majority of games out there. Getting new graphics card is not an option for me. Not because of money but because of... for real, I'm not going to buy new card only because one game is not working well with it.
Thing you mentioned about "60 and 80" is valuable knowledge though, I'll keep an eye on that in future, should I be building new computer for whatever reason.

As for optimization of Retrovirus... yeah, I'll have to agree with that. It pains me, because this is great game and yet is has such tremendous troubles and... next-to-nonexistent graphics options configuration. Things are exactly how you described them. Retrovirus is pushing my card to the limit, and while I imagine it should withstand such torment for prolonged time... I simply don't want to risk that much because of some optimization troubles of the game.

In the end I lowered the - very limited - graphics options Retrovirus is offering. Setting sampling to 75% and lowering resolution (if I may ask devs here, why there is so few resolutions available?...) made Retrovirus look somewhat ugly but prevented my card from boiling and allowed to play it for a bit. (Off topic note: 5% sampling makes me feel like playing gameboy game, hahaha~) I'd be glad if I could trade away the unnecessarily high FPS (even though I have 60Hz monitor, 30 FPS would do just fine) for lower resource drain on my GPU. Adding FPS limitation option would be really useful in my case I believe.

I don't quite think this is perfect solution for my trouble, but it will have to do for now.
I still cringe though that such innovative game with great design had to be met with terrible code execution... on the other hand I suppose it could be XNA's fault rather than developer's.

[Shadow of Avalar]

Are you aware of the NVIDIA configuration panel? You should be able to acess it in win7 by right clicking on the desktop and selecting NVIDIA control panel. I belive that your graphics card should have it, and old old g8400 I had ages ago had this panel, as does my current GTX560M

you can go to 'Manage 3D settings' on the left side, and select the 'program settings' tab. From there you should be abble to click 'add' and add the retrovirus exe file (you'll have to find it, somewhere in the steam folder, if you need help finding it, let me know). From there you can tell the graphics card to OVER-RIDE the game engine settings for that program. Note: useing these settings you can make the graphics card enhanse the games graphics as well as lowering them.
Make sure under 'Adjust image setting with preview' that it's set to 'Use the advanced 3D image settings' This should change automaticaly once you start chageing some of the 3D settings, but it is allways good to check.

In most cases this won't affect the game engine (in fact I've never had a game have an issue with this); as it's telling the graphics card to do something & the graphics card just ignores it and does what you set it to.

There are a varity of settings, if you have any questions about them let me know. But you seem to have, at least, a basic understanding of computers, and the panel gives some description, and google should be able to give you information as well.

I've used this control panel to make very old cards run newer games, by realy lowering the graphics quality. OR to make newer cards IMPROVE the graphics of older games.

[S☉larBlade ⊰⑨⊱]

Yes, I was meddling with that panel earlier but without any satisfactory outcome really... which still dazes me a little since the effect really should be more perceptible. I used it once... maybe twice, in past, with some old games and it worked well, now however, it doesn't. To make sure, I just purged all settings, deleted Retrovirus from list and then did everything from beginning. Sadly my graphics card still reacts more or less in same way to Retrovirus as earlier.

While I manage to get around myself, I thank you dearly for thorough explanation how to make use of things that normal users don't know about. I'm happy to see that there are still genuinely helpful people here that know what they are talking about. ^^

[5.1 Sound]

Is your power supply big enought ?

[S☉larBlade ⊰⑨⊱]

Certainly. I have Radix III 720W which leaves me with more power than I need to keep my Graphics Card running at full load.

[Shadow of Avalar]

too low of a power supply, would result in the graphics card not working correctly or the computer compleatly shutting down.

[S☉larBlade ⊰⑨⊱]

True that as well.

[ELSupremo]

Are you aware of the problems which have been reported concerning newer driver (I think > 314) in conjunction with "older" cards (Series 400 and 500). You may want to check for that and perhaps test an older driver.

[S☉larBlade ⊰⑨⊱]

Hmm... No, I'm not. Thank you for this information. I'll have to check it out.

[Plaid]

yeah, particularly look for the 314.22 drivers.

[Migz - DH]

What you describe doesn't sound like a problem at all. Your video card is simply running at maximum usage which creates a lot of heat which requires the higher fan speed to reject the heat. Completely normal behavior when nothing else is bottlenecking a GPU. (psn_sega651 mentioned this behavior but made it sound like the GPU was going to be damaged because of it.)

If you don't want it doing that, though, you should try setting the resolution back to the maximum for your monitor then use VSync. VSync would probably limit your framerate to 30 or 40 FPS or so, and that should greatly reduce the GPU usage. Of course, a framerate limiter of some sort would be best, but as you say, there isn't one in the Retrovirus options.

Good luck!



Also, where did you hear that 74C is the maximum you should run a GTX 460? According to Nvidia's specifications, the maximum temperature for a GTX 460 is 104C. http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-460/specifications

However, I've always (that is from 1999-today) followed this philosophy:

65-78C is my preferred operating range.

80C is a good "don't go beyond this in order to keep the card working for a long time" temperature.

90C+ is a major danger zone.

[Migz - DH]

İlk olarak psn_sega651 tarafından gönderildi:

Basicaly, Retrovirus is (IMO) not terrably optimized in the graphics department and therefore is rather graphics intense.

I forgot to say this earlier, but actually the way that the OP's card is running sounds to me like Retrovirus is very well optimized for that particular rig.

Had the game been only using, for instance, ~50% of the GPU's power, ~50% of the CPU's power, and ~50% of the system RAM, and displayed 20 or so FPS, then I'd say the optimization wasn't correct for that setup.

But, with (judging by what the OP said) nearly 100% usage and "48 - 56 FPS, and everything looks smooth", I'd say the game and video card are working very well together.

[Shadow of Avalar]

İlk olarak Migz - DH tarafından gönderildi:

İlk olarak psn_sega651 tarafından gönderildi:

Basicaly, Retrovirus is (IMO) not terrably optimized in the graphics department and therefore is rather graphics intense.

I forgot to say this earlier, but actually the way that the OP's card is running sounds to me like Retrovirus is very well optimized for that particular rig.

Had the game been only using, for instance, ~50% of the GPU's power, ~50% of the CPU's power, and ~50% of the system RAM, and displayed 20 or so FPS, then I'd say the optimization wasn't correct for that setup.

But, with (judging by what the OP said) nearly 100% usage and "48 - 56 FPS, and everything looks smooth", I'd say the game and video card are working very well together.

optimization can mean a couple of things. Your thinking of does the graphics engine have a ♥♥♥♥ load of buggs in it and not work, and it is true that a very crappy and poorly optimized graphics engine won't work at all.

However, another way to look at it is how much math (aka work for the graphics card) is involved in the graphics engine. As you may have learned in math class, there are many ways to solve a problem; in computers, they are forced to solve the math problem the way it is coded. Some solution methods take less computational power then others. What this boils down to, is a pooly optimised system in this regard, requires the graphics system to do unessesary work, that could have been avoided. IMO Source is a well optimised graphics system, even very old cards can do reasonably decent graphics and still not be running the card at 100%. While retrovirus requires a very modern card, such as the one on my computer, to run at >90%.

İlk olarak Migz - DH tarafından gönderildi:

What you describe doesn't sound like a problem at all. Your video card is simply running at maximum usage which creates a lot of heat which requires the higher fan speed to reject the heat. Completely normal behavior when nothing else is bottlenecking a GPU. (psn_sega651 mentioned this behavior but made it sound like the GPU was going to be damaged because of it.)

Also, where did you hear that 74C is the maximum you should run a GTX 460? According to Nvidia's specifications, the maximum temperature for a GTX 460 is 104C. http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-460/specifications

You have to remeber that Nvidia's specifications are for the graphics card built the way they want it. There are a few chipset manufacturers out there, that build the cards below some of these specifications, because they want to sell it for less and/or make more on each card sold.

May I point you to the disclamer on the webpage you linked to

İlk olarak Nvidia tarafından gönderildi:

Graphics card specifications may vary by Add-in-card manufacturer.

You cannot rely on the specifications that NVIDIA states to be true for your card, you must go to the company that made the part. I assumed that the 74C specification was correct, and given to him by the maker of his paticular card. if that is the case, then it would not be recomened to exceed that value.

[Migz - DH]

İlk olarak psn_sega651 tarafından gönderildi:

İlk olarak Migz - DH tarafından gönderildi:

I forgot to say this earlier, but actually the way that the OP's card is running sounds to me like Retrovirus is very well optimized for that particular rig.

Had the game been only using, for instance, ~50% of the GPU's power, ~50% of the CPU's power, and ~50% of the system RAM, and displayed 20 or so FPS, then I'd say the optimization wasn't correct for that setup.

But, with (judging by what the OP said) nearly 100% usage and "48 - 56 FPS, and everything looks smooth", I'd say the game and video card are working very well together.

optimization can mean a couple of things. Your thinking of does the graphics engine have a ♥♥♥♥ load of buggs in it and not work, and it is true that a very crappy and poorly optimized graphics engine won't work at all.

However, another way to look at it is how much math (aka work for the graphics card) is involved in the graphics engine. As you may have learned in math class, there are many ways to solve a problem; in computers, they are forced to solve the math problem the way it is coded. Some solution methods take less computational power then others. What this boils down to, is a pooly optimised system in this regard, requires the graphics system to do unessesary work, that could have been avoided. IMO Source is a well optimised graphics system, even very old cards can do reasonably decent graphics and still not be running the card at 100%. While retrovirus requires a very modern card, such as the one on my computer, to run at >90%.

I think we agree there, so I'm not really sure why you posted this with regards to mine.

I don't think you're saying that the OP's card isn't running the game well, right?