StarCraft II is the hottest game of the season in more ways than one – but luckily, there’s a fix to stop your graphics card from burning itself up.
Are you playing StarCraft II? Judging by the “approximately 1,000,000 people on Battle.net” I saw last night, you aren’t alone. However, a small portion of the thousands upon thousands of StarCraft II buyers (including a staffer at GameInformer) have been confronted with a nasty problem – the game makes their graphics card work itself to death.
The issue deals with the game’s interactive menu screens that pop up between missions, where Jim Raynor can explore his flagship and chat with crew. While the rest of the game has limits on what can be rendered, the menu screens have no framerate cap whatsoever, and some computers will interpret this to mean “go hog wild.” Rendering framerates of over 200 frames per second for extended period of times means that computers with insufficient ventilation melt themselves into oblivion. And that means you can’t play SC2, and we don’t want that.
While Blizzard will be patching in a fix, there’s a manual workaround that you can set up in the meantime – open your Documents|StarCraft II|variables.txt file, and add in the lines:
frameratecapglue=30
frameratecap=60
This will cap the framerate at a nice consistent 60 FPS and keep your computer happy and healthy while you slaughter the hell out of those nasty Zerg. Obviously, this isn’t an issue that affects all computers or all hardware since hundreds of thousands of people are playing just fine – but there’s no harm in taking a precaution or two.
