Seismic_Storm

Signed.

Only now have I realized that MMO's are actually more than just a mere game. They are communities of like minded people who look forward to escaping from the realities of a world that at times seems to have gone to hell. They are places where you can go to make new friends and not be judged in the ways we all are, perhaps because we are disfigured, or crippled, too light or too dark, too tall or too short, too thin or too fat.

It's a shame that corporations cannot take into consideration anything other than the bottom line, because there are some things more important than that... people, and perhaps social responsibility.

It's also a shame that corporations do not take into consideration another thing... Karma. Because it can be a B@#$!

Thanks for the tip kinaki.

I've noted the same effect btw at the character screen. There is literally nothing going on with the game at that point to justify GPU utilization at those levels.

My GF, my son and I do play one other game on our computers as I mentioned in my previous post. GPU load is 25% at that character screen and didn't go above 45% in game. GPU temperature never went beyond 65 degrees celsius. Mind you I didn't go into a dungeon or on a raid. In that case I would expect utilization to go up. But I didn't do any task forces in CoH either to justify those utilization rates. I just stood there lol.

Actually the graphics driver was only a few revisions behind, and when I installed the latest nvidia driver the same issue occurred.

This is actually a two-fold problem.

First, the bios' on the 8800GT's are garbage, and the driver's written for Nvidia boards aren't much better. GPU-Z reports 2 different temperature readings... one from the driver itself, and one from a sensor onboard the card. On both systems there is a 7-8 degree difference between the two at all times (driver always reports the higher value). Both cards had their fan set to 30% (I'm presuming at the bios level) and temperature variations resulted in no change to the fan speed. As I stated in my previous post an updated bios from a link on eVGA's forums provided my son's card with a fix that resolved his overheating issue. But their is no fix available for my Gigabyte card other than a third party utility.

Secondly, it is apparent that Going Rogue needs some tuning to reduce stress to the video subsystem. It turns out that that OP was quite correct when he stated that the game was eating all of his GPU cycles. In my testing GPU usage/load increased as graphic quality settings were increased, and the increase in GPU load translated into increased GPU temperatures. Eventually both load and heat would reach a stable level and all would be fine. To me this is predictable behavior; more graphical eye candy and textures place additional demands on the GPU. What doesn't make sense however is how the cards respond when adequate cooling is not present. Even when standing still, in a largely deserted and sparse city zone the GPU usage/load begins to climb again as GPU temperature increases, eventually peaking at approx. 95%.

All of my tests were conducted with the Advanced Graphics Setting disabled. I used only the 5 predefined graphics settings within the game.

The following are my results using eVGA's Precision Tool as a comparison monitor to GPU-Z. Keep in mind that these numbers will be affected by the zone you are in and the graphical elements that need to be rendered.


-Minimum Graphics Quality & Performance Quality Settings

GPU Temp: 65C
Fan Speed: 61%
GPU Usage: 25%

With no additional impact on the system, Performance Quality should be the lowest setting used in the game.


-Recommended Quality Setting

GPU Temp: 65C
Fan Speed: 61%
GPU Usage: 38-41%


-Quality Setting

GPU Temp: 70C
Fan Speed: 71%
GPU Usage: 38-42%

-Ultra Setting

GPU Temp: 80C
Fan Speed: 81%
GPU Usage: 60-64%


I have no idea at present whether this issue affects all Nvidia cards or just the 8800GT's. An interesting sidenote however is that I have yet to experience an "nvlddmkm.sys" error since adding the utility to control my video adapter's fan. City of Heroes btw was the only game that has ever caused me that issue.

One last thing, my GF has a VisionTek Radeon HD4850 in her system. She has never experienced any problems playing City of Heroes but I thought I would run the tests on her system just for comparison sake. Going Rogue is extremely taxing on her system as well, causing a large increase in GPU temperature and GPU load. While her board's fan does respond to the temperature increase it is an extremely sluggish response that leaves the card at risk in my opinion. The Radeon reached a GPU temp of 105C with a fan speed of only 60% before I got nervous and shut the game down. Despite the temperature, no system or game instability was encountered. That tells me that the Radeon is far more tolerant of high temperatures than the Nvidia models. I have since used the Catalyst Control Center to adjust her fan speed and all is well.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to agree with the op on this one, here's why:

Within the last week both my computer and my son's computer have begun experiencing video problems. He and I both have nVidia 8800GT's with the G92 GPU. He is running Vista 32bit and I am running Win7 64bit. His video card is an EVGA and mine is a Gigabyte. The "nvlddmkm.dll" issue was a problem for us like thousands of others but immediately after installing the Going Rogue expansion we both started experiencing a problem that we had never experienced before.

Within minutes of logging into the game the screen would become pixellated and then the computer would lock up. A reset of the system would bring you back to the Windows login screen but curiously the keyboard would be dead. Within a couple of minutes the keyboard would regain "consciousness" and all would appear to be good again. But logging back into COH/V would repeat the result.

I considered several possibilities:

1) A very recent Windows update might not be playing well with CoH/V - A good possibility since I had reformatted my computer just prior to updating to "Going Rogue" and did a clean OS install with all the latest updates. But when I checked my son's computer it had not been updated since September 2009. Thank goodness for antivirus programs.

2) The latest graphics driver's might not be playing well with CoH/V - I obviously had the latest Forceware driver's but my son's computer was several revisions behind.

3) The video cards might be failing - The odds of 2 different cards, from 2 different manufacturer's, at two different locations failing at the same time are pretty darned low but not out of the realm of possibility. But as the cards had no problems when idle, when surfing the net, or when playing WoW I knew the cards were not failing.

But it definitely pointed to "Going Rogue" as being the cause of the problem.

So I downloaded GPU-Z and monitored my system at idle and observed my GPU temp to hover right around 65 degrees celsius. Immediately after double clicking on the CoH icon and arriving at the login screen my GPU temp started to rise. The rise continued once I logged into the game despite the fact that I was doing nothing but standing beneath Atlas in Atlas Park with only two other heroes jumping around in front of me. When it reached 85 degrees celsius within a couple of minutes I decided to log out of the game and after doing so watched the temperature drop to the original idle temp of 65 degrees quite quickly. For the heck of it I conducted the same test in Warcraft and only saw a very slight increase in GPU temp (approx. 5 degrees)

I conducted the same test on my son's computer and noted the exact same results with the exception that the point of failure on his computer is apparently lower than my own as the screen pixellated and the computer froze at about 80 degrees celsius.

Clearly this was an issue of GPU overheating as a result of CoH. Since this did not occur prior to updating to the Going Rogue expansion I think it safe to presume that there is problem with the expansion.

To be fair my testing also indicated a problem with both video cards, specifically the bios' of the cards as GPU-Z showed that despite the rising GPU temperatures the fans on the cards were not automatically ramping up to deal with the rising temps. In fact both computers reported fan speed at a constant 30%. I did locate a third party bios update on the EVGA forums for this apparent "bug" with his video card and after flashing it repeated the test. I re-experienced the immediate rising temperatures as I had in the prior test but this time the fan on my son's card was responding to the GPU's rising temperature. I ran the test for an hour and monitored it the entire time. At no time did the system experience instability. GPU temp at the conclusion of the test was 90 degrees celsius with the fan operating at 90%.

Everyone should come away from this discussion knowing that even if you aren't experiencing a problem presently, your GPU is working quite a bit harder under this expansion than it had under the previous, and it might be a good idea to download GPU-Z and see for yourself how your graphics card is handling the load. Let's face it the majority of us just tend to turn on the computer, log in to our favorite game without even thinking about what might be going on under the hood. There is no bios update for my card so I'm using EVGA's precision tool to control the fan on my card. So far so good, I was able to play CoH for a bit today but have not had the time to put it through an adequate stress test. If anything further developes I will post it here. If you don't hear from me, consider no news to be good news!

Just a quick note, realizing I'm a wee bit late to the party but your endurance expenditure is very, very close to your rate of recovery in your posted build. If you plan on merely standing in the middle of a fight and taunting while relying on a healer or kin to keep you alive you may be fine, but my fear is that won't fare too well if there are one or two others on the team who need the same amount of attention and you are unable to defend yourself.

I would swap out the efficacy adapters for performance shifter's, using the chance for +end io's in both stamina and lightning field. The proc's from those IO's should provide you with the boost you are seeking without your having take from another power.

I agree whole heartedly.

While the forums have on occaision been painfully slow, it was something I dealt with because the discussions were often informative and entertaining.

The 2 things that aggravated me to no end were the poor excuse for a search engine, and the diatribe that often occurred due to a general lack of moderation.

I personally solved the former by using Google, and the latter by making a shortlist of those whose opinions I could usually discount immediately as being a unconstructive add-on designed merely to increase their post count.

Hopefully both will be easily solved by the new forum platform.