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Can a game kill a GPU?

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Soldato
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What I'd love to know is NVIDIA has to give it approval, so how did they miss it? Or is NVIDIA not as strict in their manufacturing as we'd assume for AIBs?
 
Associate
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Well yeah Furmark loaded up all the cores in a way that games don't so everything overheated I remember trying it once on a 4870x2 and watching the VRM's hitting 120c+ at which point it shut it down before they went pop the temp was still rising. Its the same issue the overheating VRM's on the 30xxFE cards were having during mining they constantly load the card in a way that games don't, they weren't designed for that kind of use, mining cards exist for a reason. Later manufacturers found ways of detecting Furmark and stopping it from doing its thing I remember early attempts you simply renamed the .exe and away it would go again, later driver revisions were more sophisticated but the principles the same its detecting and load limiting it rather than a more robust design of the hardware.

The EVGA though was bugging out in normal use not Furmark etc a regular gaming session would break it. According to rumour and hearsay the US built versions are better quality the euro cards are just rubbish.

Games can't load the cores like Furmark does, there's no real practical use from what Furmark is doing other than testing the cards. But it's not a binary thing, there's different degrees to which the cores can be loaded depending on what the game is doing. Some instructions you give to the GPU will execute more or less efficiently. I suspect what was happening is that drawing basic 2D loading screens you've got extremely simple draw calls that can iterate very fast (hence extreme frame rates). But it's easier for the GPU to do that efficiently. It's a static image, there should be no sense of cores having to pause execution to see the result of some other function. There's no interdependence with drawing a static 2D image, where there is a lot with complex 3D scenes. Some instructions depend on the result of some other instruction done first, so the scheduler has to try and order these things in such a way as to load the cores as much as possible. But you still end up with some gaps in execution on some parts of the GPU with a complex scene, but with a simple one

My understanding is this has happened before, games like Starcraft 2 had menus that were uncapped and lead to bricking cards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft_II:_Wings_of_Liberty#Technical_difficulties and the same thing happened the devs had to patch in frame rate limiting. So there's something common about the menus being a problem.

There is some dislike for Furmark which I think is unfair. While it is an extreme, the simple fact is that some instances in games can come closer to Furmark like load than others. The purpose of testing the extremes is that if things are stable at the extremes then you know you're safe with any other app. And the lack of testing like this has lead to the problems we see today. People like to say that you don't find apps like Furmark in the wild so testing like that is not necessary but I kind of disagree. First of all you have furmark itself, that's not going away, you can write an exception for it but that just leads to cat and mouse detection and evasion. But also someone in theory could write a virus that behaves like Furmark and runs full pelt but with nothing drawn to the screen, and then you'd have a virus that can brick badly tested cards...that's an awful thought.
 
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Soldato
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Link to the article in English here :-

EVGA GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 3090 and (not only) New World – when design flaws cause graphics cards to run amok | Tests

https://www.igorslab.de/en/evga-gef...cs-card-goes-amok-because-of-design-failures/

It shows the problem with the EVGA FTW3 cards.
What a shock. I'm sure all the shills, fanboys and "journalists" (might as well have just written shills twice) saying it was definetly the game doing something abnormal and trying to spread FUD about AMD cards being affected too will be issuing corrections. Any minute now...
 
Soldato
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What a shock. I'm sure all the shills, fanboys and "journalists" (might as well have just written shills twice) saying it was definetly the game doing something abnormal and trying to spread FUD about AMD cards being affected too will be issuing corrections. Any minute now...

Exactly..

Anyone that has been watching the EVGA FTW3 cards would have known these were failing even before this Amazon game, the EVGA forums are full of proof this is a design problem as they were failing on other games and benchmark tools. But not one of these shills would admit that, when the evidence was right there, but of course they didn't want to upset their free cards sponser and money in the back pocket. This is the problem now in the world of youtube and sites that have paid advertising by the click and the never ending clickbait and false information to protect their sponsors.

Wait for Gamersnexus, he's an EVGA shill too, like Hardware unboxed are MSI shills, Linus LG shill etc etc, you just need to watch the channels and realise who they shill for all the time.
 

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Soldato
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Exactly..

Anyone that has been watching the EVGA FTW3 cards would have known these were failing even before this Amazon game, the EVGA forums are full of proof this is a design problem as they were failing on other games and benchmark tools. But not one of these shills would admit that, when the evidence was right there, but of course they didn't want to upset their free cards sponser and money in the back pocket. This is the problem now in the world of youtube and sites that have paid advertising by the click and the never ending clickbait and false information to protect their sponsors.

Wait for Gamersnexus, he's an EVGA shill too, like Hardware unboxed are MSI shills, Linus LG shill etc etc, you just need to watch the channels and realise who they shill for all the time.

You'd be doing it too if you were in that situation.
 
Soldato
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Leeds
You'd be doing it too if you were in that situation.

Actually I would not mate, had companies trying to buy me off before with their goods and trying to get us to use their equipment in our company and to sell on to our clients. This is why I find that behaviour not acceptable as the companies that normally do that have equipment that is not up to scratch or they change it after the preview models and make it worse over time or they have good stuff and then raise the prices like crazy once they get you hooked onto their equipment.

I do understand why some do it as I said Jay has a young family and this youtube job is his only income, but he also needs to remember to behave in a moral and ethical way too or it will all go to poop really quickly for him and people like him. I actually like Jay and understand why he has to do what he does sometimes, but reality is he didn't have to do the testing video and blame amazon for the game without proof, all he had to do was wait and talk to EVGA as he said he did, so I'm sure they would have said why they are having the problems or may have not said anything to him about what is causing the fault (company protecting its rear behaviour).

Only reason he did the video is he knows the clicks would be huge on it and a quick money video with little effort put into it as we saw, basically clickbait with no real information of what the fault is and he pretended again not an EVGA fault without 100% proof or he again may have known what the issue really is and made sure not to show it on the video and as said he is sponsored by EVGA like crazy with hardware and money, so not really a person I would have expected to come out and say hey...mine blew up too and EVGA FTW3 have a fault.

Was never going to happen, he lost his morals and ethical reporting a long time ago when it became his only income the channel. Same with many of the youtube channels.. They all have an agenda of some sorts. All Jay had to do was not do a video and say well lets wait and see what the AIBS report back is failing on their cards, but he had to sit there and shill EVGA and protect the guilty while the innocent the game makers had nothing to do with it apart from their game is demanding on systems and systems that have a weakness it will show it, like any stress tools would or benchmark tools.

What annoyed me about this situation was how Jay behaved and how he tried to drag down every other AIB and AMD with it and deflect from EVGA and blaming Amazon game devs, the game is a beta and an easy target because of it being not complete and is expected to have faults, but how he behaved about that and used the patch amazon did as proof they were the cause of damage to cards, but the only real cards that got damaged were the ones from his sponsor EVGA and the FTW3 models only the ones with the Fan & Sensor IC that EVGA sell on these silly cards that are not up to scratch and have a design fault in many places from power load balancing problems, to rubbish thermal putty everywhere (because they didn't have the right thermal pad sizes or badly designed cooler), to cheap components on a premium card and the list goes on with these cards.

Now all with AMD cards or other cards that had a shut down during this game was because some were not using the correct wattage PSU, their system is unstable maybe bad XMP or memory overclocks, cpu overclocks, thermal problems in the case, cooling not good on cpu, etc. Difference is all these cards recovered after a restart and DID NOT become bricks, so proving the game is not the cause, the game may show up a system that is not designed correctly or using a underpowered PSU or thermal issues in the case etc. Go try shadow of the tomb raider at full max settings that will knock badly designed systems over too, or any benchmark tool, but it doesn't brick the gpu that is designed right but will show the weak link in your system like a badly designed card or underpowered psu or a badly designed psu.
 
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Associate
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Sussex
As a side note I regret buying an X570 motherboard, or in fact anything at all, from Gigabyte. Their product quality is sub-standard and has been for years, based on purchases by my partner and I.

Years is unfortunately probably correct.
A long time ago I used to buy a lot of their cheap boards (back in the Conroe days when with a cheap £35 board and £50 CPU you could do some serious overclocking). And those were fine.
A bit later I bought a Gigabyte HD7950 and was very disappointed that they had swapped the VRM controller from what TPU had reviewed and the only way to adjust (I wanted to undervolt as the default 1.25V was excessive, loud, and unnecessary) was with a custom BIOS.
Been avoiding Gigabyte ever since.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
6 Feb 2019
Posts
17,464
Exactly..

Anyone that has been watching the EVGA FTW3 cards would have known these were failing even before this Amazon game, the EVGA forums are full of proof this is a design problem as they were failing on other games and benchmark tools. But not one of these shills would admit that, when the evidence was right there, but of course they didn't want to upset their free cards sponser and money in the back pocket. This is the problem now in the world of youtube and sites that have paid advertising by the click and the never ending clickbait and false information to protect their sponsors.

Wait for Gamersnexus, he's an EVGA shill too, like Hardware unboxed are MSI shills, Linus LG shill etc etc, you just need to watch the channels and realise who they shill for all the time.

Or maybe LG OLED's are just the best gaming screens in the world :D

And Linus will shill for anyone if you pay him enough with free products, he's basically being able to fully renovate his house just from free stuff he's received
 
Associate
Joined
23 Oct 2019
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484
Overall it's a big problem with, it happens the exact same with gaming reviewers, reason you don't see AAA games getting reviewed with less than 8/7 digits even if they are absolute garbage.
 
Associate
Joined
4 Nov 2015
Posts
250
Years is unfortunately probably correct.
A long time ago I used to buy a lot of their cheap boards (back in the Conroe days when with a cheap £35 board and £50 CPU you could do some serious overclocking). And those were fine.
A bit later I bought a Gigabyte HD7950 and was very disappointed that they had swapped the VRM controller from what TPU had reviewed and the only way to adjust (I wanted to undervolt as the default 1.25V was excessive, loud, and unnecessary) was with a custom BIOS.
Been avoiding Gigabyte ever since.
I've just suffered from poor quality components more than anything. Graphics cards that are huge yet cool worse than other cards that are smaller; coil wine on cards and motherboards when others are silent; terrible BIOS update delays; crap BIOS menus.. I'm sure there's more.

I didn't expect EVGA cards to die though. I thought they were top quality. Guess not!
 
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