what exactly is V-Sync and what does it do, I cant seem to figure out if I should turn it on or off to help with the overheat crash problems?
Q6600
Geforce GTS 250 1mb (Civ V burned up my Geforce 9800 GTX+)
thanks in advance for lessons and info
what exactly is V-Sync and what does it do, I cant seem to figure out if I should turn it on or off to help with the overheat crash problems?
Q6600
Geforce GTS 250 1mb (Civ V burned up my Geforce 9800 GTX+)
thanks in advance for lessons and info
instead of just copy and paste, here read this, best description i found.
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=928593
The super quick explanation is that it makes it so that your framerate syncs up with your monitor's refresh rate. When it is turned on, you should not see any "screen tearing" which is when you see the top half of the screen not quite match up with the bottom half of the screen. I always notice it most in first person games if you pan the camera to the side quickly.
Typically vsync will lower your framerate but eliminate tearing. It's a matter of taste; I personally always turn it off because tearing doesn't bother me so much.
But that's a pretty non-technical explanation; the like axebyte gave above is much more comprehensive.
OP, please, please, please. Do not listen to 2kgreg, he is really telling you some really bad information. Please leave vsync on or checked. Please do not turn it off. If you decided to follow 2kGreg personal advice, understand it is going to stress your system past breaking. Please dont do it.
Originally Posted by 2K Greg
As I reported 2 weeks ago, and never got an answer, running the game with out vsync enable WILL cause the game to push the gpu really, really, really hard when it is in menu, city screens, and diplomacy, from about 3% usage with vsync, to 99% usage without vsync.
Running the game without Vsync enabled will push the video card too hard and cause built up heat, especially if you use the menu to pause the game. In a liquid cooled system this is about 10C. In an air cooled perfect system, this is about 30C. In a poor or non cooled system, ie standard pc or laptap, this could be more then 60C. If you do this, your average pc will over heat and lock up.
I reported this to tech ian 2 weeks ago. The exact message was:
Since, you guys are keeping record of all the complaints (yea right). You already know this, because tech ian already filed a bug report (yea right).Subject: Vsync, showstopper.
If you turn off Vsync in the graphics menu and restart. The menu system and the diplomacy system cause the gpu to run at 95-98%.I am not joking, tested this on 4 systems, it does happen.
To reproduce it, just install gpu temperature monitory software, like afterburn. Load the software, go to the video option menu, turn off Vsync. Look at the load at the menu. For me it was like 3% load. Restart the machine go back to the video menu, and you will see the gpu get set to 95%.
Load a game, enter diplomacy menu. Gpu will spike to 98%, normally at 50%.
This was done on all my systems.
Swear to god, this is going to be bioshock 2 all over again.
Last edited by Draco; 10-13-2010 at 08:06 AM.
I never turn it on. Out of all the "issues" graphically most games tend to have tearing bothers me so little. I'd much rather have higher textures/shadows on and/or smoother fps than not having to worry about tearing
I also had issues when I had an older computer with alot of games like NWN2, DA:O and Awakening, TESIV: Oblivion and Fallout 3 that when I had V-Sync on the framerate would just get absolutely hammered to the ground, yet I could play on high everything else lol. So I never go with V-Sync, waste of computer resources IMO.
V-Sync doesn't consume resources exactly, it just forces your framerate to sync with your monitor's refresh rate. Typically with an LCD this means 60FPS. Some minor screen lag can occur, turning on triple buffering is usually the fix (that may consume some resources.)
Draco, what advice?
Perhaps you should re-read what was posted, and restate your position
So, conflicting advice. What's the general consensus? Turn V-sync on or off to improve performance?
You first!
2kgreg said he turns it off. I said that advice runs the gpu at a high rate.
If you don't believe me, run msi afterburn and do the test yourself. http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/
Bottom line, 2kgreg's personal tastes will cause the game to over work the gpu. Which is added heat, heat and silicon do not go together very well.
In most games, when it is properly coded for, vsync does chew up resources. But when it is not coded for, it is hardware killer.
Guess which option civ 5 too, yep, badly coded for.
Rofl. Why do people always think it is software that causes their hardware to crap out? You know these days when everyone is willing to cut corners to make an extra penny, faulty hardware is much more likely your problem. Especially, when it comes to something that the market tries their best to push to the limits anyway like a video card. I highly doubt there is anything in the Civ 5 code that does much different than any other game as far as monitoring framerates. All these games are pretty standard in their use of DirectX. The entire purpose of having DirectX is to abstract away low level details of video hardware. Video cards are the number 1 component to crap out on a system and it is not the fault of the software that is running. It is cheap heatsinks, cheap memory, thinner and more compact components, and capicitors that radio shack would be ashamed to stock on their shelves.
On a side note. I've pushed my video card to 2000+ fps in my graphics engine, rendering some simple 3d and lighting, for hours and never had my video card moan at me. Did it get hot? yea. Did it go past the heat threshhold? no.
Last edited by brekehan; 10-13-2010 at 08:50 AM.
It depends on your hardware I'd guess. The "trade off" with VSYNC is that is cannot allow a variance of FPS as "regular" display modes can. If your display runs at 60 Hz for example, VSYNC will attempt to run at 60 FPS. However, if your video card or system in general lag behind, it will not drop to 55, or 49, but 30. As a reference:
60 Hz 60, 30, 20, 15, 12, ... fps
75 Hz 75, 38, 25, 19, 15, ... fps
I copied this from a book of mine - the Hz represent your screens refresh rate and the FPS the Frames Per Second your video card will render. Anything below 15 FPS will be regarded as severe image lag.
The reason why you may lose performance with VSYNC is that your graphics card must wait for your screen to refresh in order to swap the front and back buffers (those are another topic, just think of the back buffer as the image you will see next frame and the front buffer as the image you see right now). You can counter that effect somewhat with Triple Buffering, which will use two back buffers for rendering operations, however that will cost additional performance.
As Draco (I think) mentioned, Civ 5 can cause massive frame spikes when it does render no graphics intensive stuff, and this may cause a video card to get really, really hot. I don't know why that is, usually the engine should limit itself to a certain FPS, but sometimes that technique is not good performance wise or just not feasible. There ware several games I noticed that have or had that issue, like Star Trek Online (which actually killed my already damaged card) or StarCraft 2.
It is important to note, though, that a graphics card usually does not just die because of insane FPS amount. I can run a test unity project with a detailed, textured model moving around at 800 FPS and nothing happens for hours. It is when cards already have micro fractures (and that happens more often than I like) that serious damage can happen. But that means that a card already is "unhealthy".
Hope my text was somewhat understandable. it's really really late here and I think I should get some sleep...
One empirical data point: when playing Civ V my rig (Q6600 & GTX460) is pulling a good 50 or 60 watts more than the other recently released games I play, and most of that seems to be GPU. I'd imagine the XP drivers for the 460 need some optimization, though, so it's hard to know who to blame.
Greg didnt give any advice
Your right, he said what he did. I just miss read it. Just like this whole debacle.
http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=93823
I forget that the official line is to side step and obfuscate.
By the way one of my favorite quotes.
"But what science may never be able to explain is our ineffable fear of the alien among us; a fear which often drives us not to search for understanding, but to deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate. To obscure the truth not only from others, but from ourselves. " Scully X-files.
Thanks for all the thoughts and advice...
I've been trying every known setting and read just about every driver and heat related subject.
I may just return this brand new GeForce GTS 250 1gb card...
however I dont know what I can afford that will actually to battle and win with Civ V monster GPU issues..
unfortunately the people that have the good running cards dont need to post, wonder what card is the most stable on CIV V
Get an ATI 5xxx series that meets your budget. The 6xxx series will be starting to roll out at the end of the month so there should be some discounts on the 5xxx models.
ATI has not had the manufacturing issues that Nvidia has had over the past few years. I am generally brand agnostic and go for the price/performance that I want, but I am steering clear of Nvidia for a while until they prove that they can design chips without defects.
Midrange Nvidia cards like the 8600 were the worse offenders.
Software people are now having to put up with the fact that Nvidia sold millions of defective GPUs and they crap out after "too many" hot/cold cycles. Nvidia chose inferior materials, knew there would be issues and sold them anyways. Overtime the material cracks from the hot/cold cycling and poof fried cards.
People blame software because it is usually the latest and greatest that stresses cards the most. But the cards have been deteriorating for some time and cannot handle max load without death. Also, some cards die faster than others.
I will say that there have not been any reports of the same issue outside of the Nvidia 8xxx cards having the crack/fry issue, but Nvidia did have trouble shifting to the 40nm production process which makes me skittish with their latest products.
ATI > Nvidia
Depends on price and features. Both make great cards but for the price and features you can not beat the nvidia 460's
I have a 260 GTX and it's working fine. But both of the cards you mentioned should be fine as well, if both are having trouble running Civ V, you likely have a heat issue - more likely to be caused by your case than the cards themselves.
Oh btw., don't turn off vsync if you already have heat issues. A game like Civ V doesn't need more than 60 fps. Turning off vsync essentially kills your ability to reduce the stress on your hardware by turning down quality.
Yay for my ATI Radeon HD 4870,an old card that still let's me play the game with all details maxed! =)
Oh, but I gotta be careful. Playing with VSync off (like I do with all my games). And while it's temperature is way low, I realize now after reading Draco's posts that it'll probably explode on me any time soon ;D
I've been playing around with the EVGA Precision program that lets you boost fan speed and tweak CPU core speed and Video card bus speed.
I forgot to state that the GTS 250 I have seems to freak out only at 61 degrees which I thought was too low for an overheat, but Ive been watching the (artifacting) crashes now and it seems to correspond with a large GPU load and a temp that hits 60-61 degrees.
last night I played for 3 hrs no crashes when I used EVGA Precision and changed to theses settings
Core Clock 819
Shader Clock 1979
Memory Clock 1104
Fan Speed 90%
BTW, my overall temp in game under-stress actually dropped 4 degrees (wierd huh?)
I personally think my first card died of heat exhaustion(fallout @, DDO, and CIV V), but I believe this new card issues are NOT SOLELY heat related I believe its somehow a spike in GPU demand driving it past its resources.
my GPU usage chart looks like a super srtong heart beat graph while playing Civ V GPU usage spikes then lags then spikes then lags, increasing the avalible resources seems to stabalize the game I'm going to paly now and see if it was a fluke or a solution, if it works again I'll post my entire setting list including the modified nividia control panel changes.
UPDATE: didnt make it past 30 mins...
UPDATE 2: bought a EVGA GTX 460 1024mb GDDR5 card ... its AWSOME!!! 2 hrs not even a flicker, everything on med and high settings Compusa $224 I know its not cheap but for the headache and amount I use my PC worth it in the long run... I wish you all luck, its fun when you can play more then 5 turns!
Last edited by Bloodyaxe; 10-14-2010 at 03:06 AM.
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