I posted this a while ago on Anandtech and got mixed replies. Does putting a cap on your FPS decrease the work your video card does, thereby decreasing temperatures, or does it just throw the extra frames out? Starcraft 2 caused damage to some people's hardware when it was released because it didn't have an FPS cap in the main menu, so the cards got hot from drawing a simple scene very quickly (as much as the user's fault as Blizzard's)... yet in some games I've noticed almost no temperature change from capping framerate, even if it's a drastic change. If a low FPS cap can indeed reduce temperatures, I'm curious as to why more games don't include it. Vsync is an option, but it has its own issues... I hate the extra input lag (now someone's going to say how they can't perceive the input lag with vsync on - I wish I were you). Perhaps FPS caps only decrease temperatures for some games and don't affect others? This is confusing and is annoying me. Q_Q PS. Are there any programs that can force an FPS cap for all games? There was one a while ago but I believe it only works for older titles and DX9 games.
What they didn't tell you in the StarcraftII article about overheating was those people were trying to play on the same PC's they had played the original Starcraft on. Coincidence? No modern GPU simply dies from moderate overclocks or too much heat. Modern GPU's will freeze, BSOD, crash to the desktop, or the fan will override to 100% RPM if it gets too hot. It's the older generation of GPU's with their Oreo cookie sized fans that can't deal with it or didn't have that fail safe feature.
I know... I think it's an oversight on Blizzard part but not really their fault. Any other stress test would have most likely killed the victims' cards as well. It's an issue of poor ventilation - user error... like the people that play games with their laptops lying on their beds, etc. and wonder why they overheat.
Another thing is that many of those failures come from laptops, a lot of laptops weren't really meant for gaming lol. They're like, "ooooh Starcraft II, let's put my IGP to the extreme ... I don't care as I long as I haz Starcraft II " ... well, that will kill their graphics subsystem. Personally, I haven't seen any actual GPUs going down due to this problem. deltatux
the load/stress on the GPU caused by a framerate cap varies depending on the game, the graphics card used, and the framerate cap being enforced. ie. in 'the last remnant' with my setup, at 1920x1080p i manually force vsync (60) in the nvidia control panel. i minimise the input lag by setting the pre rendered frames value to 1. this only puts 40% load on my gpu. average temperature while playing this game ends up being around 55C. if i remove the framerate cap and let the load hit 100%, average temps climb up to around 70-72C. this is with an ambient temp of 30C. this temp drop is mainly due to the engine being fairly well optimised, so my system can easily average 150fps+ when my gpu is running at full load. however, some games are more strenuous, and require more graphics power to hit the framerate cap. take crysis or metro2033 for example. my computer is incapable of handling 60fps in either game without a significant reduction in visual quality. so imposing a framerate cap in these games will not cause a reduction on temperatures as your GPU would be running at full load to try to satisfy the framerate cap. for forcing a framerate cap, you can manually force vsync in the nvidia control panel for certain games. if input lag is an issue, just set the pre-rendered frames to 1 or 0. in games using the unreal engine, you can edit the config file to set your own framerate cap. in call of duty games, you can set a framerate cap in the config files as well.
