GPU is getting way too hot

[76561198076311928]

My GPU gets very hot when running ths game, despite being 10 year old game... Is there any way to lower down the graphics settings to match that of the old one?

Temperature is at 80 degree celcius. Unchecking the graphics options only reduced the temperatures from 82c to 80c.

Edit: Ok disabling shadows allowed it to drop to 76c but this is still way too hot for a 10 year old game. Any help?

[MR2_Pilot]

VSYNC helps, locks FPS to 60. My GPU fan sounded like an airplane before I used VSYNC. Is your system a desktop or laptop?

[76561198076311928]

Yeah without vsync it's even worse. But with vsync it's not much better.. surely there must be a way for the developers to allow us to turn the old graphic options on?

[MR2_Pilot]

I've found that I have to open up my desktop case and clean the fans / vents about once a year, otherwise they lose too much efficiency, especially the GPU fan which gets really blocked up with dust. As long as your careful not to shock anything with static (ground yourself), it's a 15 minute easy job which usually pays off very well.

[IpiSmASH]

I would reccomend taking off the heatsink, cleaning off the stock thermal compound on the gpu with rubbing alcohol, apply artic silver 5, should take a few degrees off the gpu (and cpu)

[2CR]

What GPU do you have?

[MR2_Pilot]

Originally posted by Fluoridated:

I would reccomend taking off the heatsink, cleaning off the stock thermal compound on the gpu with rubbing alcohol, apply artic silver 5, should take a few degrees off the gpu (and cpu)

Great product, makes a noticeable 2-5 degree difference. Clean out the dust while you're in there.

[Falaris]

The reason some old games (and a few new ones) run the GPU something fierce is that they do not limit the frames per second (FPS). So, instead of working hard to make the picture as nice looking as possible, it's working hard to showel as many frames to the screen as possible. Same - or more - work, but a complete waste. Turning down settings won't matter much, because it'll just shovel them out faster instead.

Turning VSYNC on is a way to limit the frame rate to what your screen is displaying - more than your screen refresh is meaningless, after all. However, that is a side effect - the main reason to turn VSYNC on is to avoid the screen 'tearing' by displaying parts of two different frames at the same time. A frame being 'pushed to screen' while the screen is refreshing will result in half the screen having one picture and the other half a slightly different one, giving it a 'torn' appearance.

Depending on your screen - if it is a 3D screen with 100-120Mhz refresh, VSYNC will not limit your refresh rate all that much.

If VSYNC doesn't fix the issue fully, an option (other than dusting your PC, allways a good idea if you haven't done it in a (long) while) is to change the setting in your video card (NVIDIA Control Panel, if you're using an Nvidia based card) to override the game setting. Set the prerendered frames to 1, or adaptable (half).

Note that this is more of a generic answer/explanation. I haven't had this problem in AoM myself (after turning VSYNC on) so you may be running into something different. If you haven't done so before, I'd be a little careful with removing or replacing the CPU gel and such, like the above suggestions.

[IV:XX]

dust is useless here, this game heats up the GPU more than RDR2 on ultras

[IV:XX]

As soon as I turned on vertical sync the temperature dropped by about 40 degrees C. Obviously this is how it works in games. but I’ve probably never seen such a big difference.

[Falaris]

Originally posted by IV:XX:

As soon as I turned on vertical sync the temperature dropped by about 40 degrees C. Obviously this is how it works in games. but I’ve probably never seen such a big difference.

You'll see it in some games - even fairly new ones - where the menus are shown with a different (part of the) engine than the main game - often settings only apply to the game itself, so if you pause in a menu the PC will attempt to take off.