Home Starcraft 2 Bug Is Melting Graphics Cards – Here's The Fix

Starcraft 2 Bug Is Melting Graphics Cards – Here's The Fix

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SC2fire.jpg

That isn’t a sensationalist headline, Starcraft 2 is, in its current state, capable of making your graphics card overheat and turn itself into a very expensive soup.

Starcraft 2 developers Blizzard seemed to have somehow overlooked a tiny detail in their code, and the results can be, well… expensive. The issue is pretty simple in that Blizzard somehow forgot to limit the games framerate when you are in the menus.

What this essentially means is that while you are playing the game, the graphics card is keeping up with what it needs to do and that’s fine. However, when you are in the menus it only has to render some simple graphics and the lack of a framerate limiter means that the graphics card starts pumping out some ludicrously high amounts of frames to its best ability, eventually causing the poor thing to commit suicide for no reason.

Until it is patched, you can sort it out with a simple temporary fix, here’s how you do it.

[Thanks to Poddle for pointing this out]

Ok, here’s what you need to do:

  • For PC, navigate to your Documents\StarCraft II\Variables.txt
  • For Mac, navigate to your home folder \Documents\Blizzard\StarCraft II\Variables.txt
  • Open the file with a text editor (notepad for PC or TextEdit on Mac are fine)  
  • Ok, now add these two lines into the file:

    frameratecapglue=30
    frameratecap=60

  • Hit Save, and you are good to go.

Ok, that’s all folks, do this and you should be owning noobs with your l33t build orders in no time, fire free.

Last Updated: August 3, 2010

13 Comments

  1. sweet thanks for this .. not that I had any noticeable problems but better safe than sorry 😉

    Reply

  2. Uncle

    August 3, 2010 at 13:48

    Lol way to test out the menus Blizzard. I wonder if they will refund people who had their faces melt off because of this bug?

    Reply

  3. Fox1

    August 3, 2010 at 15:38

    Um… :blink:

    Reply

  4. Steve Hofmeyr

    August 3, 2010 at 17:05

    I call BS. How can a GFX card kill itself by pumping out high frame rates. :dizzy:

    Reply

  5. Nick de Bruyne

    August 3, 2010 at 17:10

    Well like I said, apparently because there is no frame limiter, and the menu is so simple, the graphics card is capable of pumping out ridiculously high frames with nothing to stop it, so it does.

    Reply

  6. Felicity

    August 3, 2010 at 18:33

    thanks Nick

    Reply

  7. Worm

    August 4, 2010 at 06:18

    I’m pretty sure if you have a graphics card capable of running the game (still made in this century) it will shut down before it gets too hot to start melting.
    And with this theory, if I would to play pac man on a current generation pc, my graphics card would melt because the game is running to fast?

    Reply

  8. Arc316

    August 4, 2010 at 08:50

    Surely GFX cards must have some of its own protection against overheating. Like motherboards do.

    Reply

  9. koldFU5iON

    August 4, 2010 at 09:06

    Apparantly no-one wasted time sitting in the menu’s they just went straight into a game

    Reply

  10. faheem

    August 4, 2010 at 22:04

    so has this crap been patched yet or am i still at risk of a full MBpro meltdown?

    sonovab****

    but thanks for the heads up Nick :ermm:

    Reply

  11. Pedro

    August 23, 2010 at 19:37

    so, you all think its not possible then? to all you naysayers and non-believers, i am in safe mode right now. I was playing SC2 as my menu loaded and I moved from a cut-scene into the main menu my screen went black, I couldn’t figure out the issue, so I restarted my PC only to find that my picture was off to one side by about half an inch and all my text blurry, as in when you save text as a .jpg or something… Yeah, I’m pretty sure my card has half killed itself.

    My card is (was?) an Nvidia GeForce 8800, and so plenty capable of running the game with out complications (i would have thought)

    Reply

  12. Pedro

    August 23, 2010 at 20:13

    Well, after a driver install my card is working again, but after having seen this post and many like it, that gave me a scare!

    Reply

  13. BlakLLliclow.320

    January 11, 2011 at 01:49

    ATI cards dont have that probplem,Im running a XFX HD5670 and Catalyst Control Center has a auto tuning ability anyway,SO BS !!!

    Reply

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