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Graphics card question

Posted: Sun Oct 11, 2020 2:11 pm
by stimpy
Been playing Iron Harvest for a couple of days.
It sometimes doesnt load and when it does, my computer gets pretty loud.
When it doesnt load, I have to ctrl-alt-delete to stop it.
When I did, I noticed this:

Image

Does the fact that it's using almost 100% of my gpu mean I should be thinking of a graphics card upgrade?
The card is a Radeon RX 580 4gb. Came preinstalled in the computer I just bought a year ago.

Re: Graphics card question

Posted: Sun Oct 11, 2020 5:04 pm
by Isgrimnur
Yes.

Tom's Hardware
Below is our legacy desktop GPU hierarchy with historical comparisons dating back to the 1990s. We have not tested most of these cards in many years, driver support has ended on many of the models, and the relative rankings are relatively coarse. We group cards into performance tiers, pairing disparate generations where overlap occurs.

Re: Graphics card question

Posted: Sun Oct 11, 2020 7:35 pm
by gameoverman
I've noticed that sometimes when my CPU or GPU gets caught in some kind of endless loop, the fans kick in full blast because of 100%(or close to it) use.

In a game this has happened because I had no framerate cap set and once the menu screen loaded my GPU was providing a ridiculously high framerate like 300fps. That can happen because menu screens aren't anywhere near as demanding as the game. If you cap your framerate to 60fps and the problem goes away then you know this is it.

Sometimes the game is loading and it leverages the GPU for some reason, this increases GPU usage. If the game gets stuck in that step and can't get past it then the GPU usage just keeps increasing until it maxes out. This might happen due to a driver conflict or some other software issue.

My first step is to run a program like MSI Afterburner and start the game. You want to watch the onscreen display. In particular pay attention to framerate(fps), GPU usage, and vram usage. This way you can see what's going on before it locks up. If you see an fps spike to something very high like 300fps then it locks up, there's a good indication that's at least part of the problem.

Of course this could be a GPU issue, not related to this game. I'd use a stress test for GPUs to put a full load on your card and see if it causes the program or computer to lock up. Also, maybe at full load your powersupply is failing to provide enough power. Unless you have a top quality powersupply then I'd suspect that if the stress test locks up.

Re: Graphics card question

Posted: Sun Oct 11, 2020 10:06 pm
by hitbyambulance
the RX 580 is still comfortably above the minimum requirements for Iron Harvest. see advice gameoverman posted above