Overtemp

User Support Hub Hardware & Peripherals
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Asobo has to start looking at how the graphics card consumes resources because there is going to be a graveyard of plates.
None of us like them to be on fire, especially when we know that high temperatures are enemies of the circuits and harm our equipment.
Last week, after a year of almost daily use of the simulator, I had to disassemble the video card, change thermal pads and thermal paste. I have an MSI RX 6700XT 12G Gaming and I can say that no game from the extensive catalog that I have, using it in HD and set to ULTRA causes so much temperature.
I have reached 114 degrees in the Hotspot almost all time doing a common flight and see 98 degrees in the GPU DIE.
After maintenance with changing pads (unfortunately MSI 6700XT it uses many different sizes: 1.25 - 1.5 - 2 - 2.5 and 3mm thick, which implies a significant outlay of money on pads with good conductivity) it has dropped to 79 /80 on the GPU and 101 on the Hotspot. This is a plate that raises a lot of heat, but basically with this program.
Neither Just Cause 4, nor Crysis remastered, nor Destroy All Humans, nor X-Plane 11.5, Battlefield Hardline, GTA5 or many others make my board go over 65 degrees on the GPU and 80 on the hotspot and for a few minutes.

What about MSFS2020 that demands so much? , Is it going to be better optimized?

It is true that I can go to HIGH quality or less to relieve the plate, but that is not my idea of ​​​​enjoying a game. If the others are more than comfortable due to temperature, it makes me think that the graphics engine needs to be reviewed in some way. I don’t know what other users think but video cards are not very cheap in my country, and I want to keep the one I have for several years.

How many more are having overheating problems?

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MSFS spins up my fans to high, but temp on GPU according to Armory Crate Software is 78 or so in MSFS, and I have most settings medium only. I have hit 86C before I just turned everything down. This is on a laptop. I did have to change both CPU and GPU fan in it as they were starting to wobble, you could hear them flex when moving laptop around on lap while reading book on it. Did not have to change any thermal paste, as they were not attached directly to either unit.

I agree, this game takes more resources than any other sim I have played. XP12 is running GPU up to 80 now, but still playing around with settings, and new build weekly, so who know exactly what is changing under the hood there. For now leaving settings where they are. RTX-2070 card/chip.

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A couple of things i have learnt is that “Ultra” in game A is not the same as “Ultra” in game B. There is no need to push FS to Ultra - many of the settings make little or no visible change from High to Ultra apart from workload.

FS is the only title I know that is trying to reproduce the real world, in detail, in a moving simulation. :wink:

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It’s not MSFS. It runs my overclocked two fan rtx3060 pegged at 100%, hotspot 83°C all stock cooling. This is perfectly normal and well within it’s <90°C range infact even spiking past 100° would not damage it. However running hot shortens the lifespan of any electrical equipment and that won’t ever change.

The MSFS devs do not cap performance, if you are uncomfortable with your temps then set a frame cap.

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Seeing that you are playing on a laptop made me wonder how many people use laptops for flightsim, I would never dream of trying to, I could not see how the temps would not elevate above comfortable in too short a time. Perfectly happy to be educated on this matter, but I have a desktop pc with a water cooled cpu using 3 fans, 6 case fans, and a RTX3070ti with 3 of it’s own fans. Admittedly I have no heat issues, but that’s how a new gaming box more or less comes.

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Fan curves, aggressive fan curves.

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Get them spinning before they are needed, stock curves are more 
 oh no it got too hot cool it down!

In general my CPU and GPU run about 65c in a “cool room” 23c ish , both always overclocked.

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I undervolt my 2070s with Affterburner.

Temps go anywhere between 60C and 70C.

Before that it was around 80-85.

MSFS is the only thing I run that makes it that hot.

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It’s a gamer laptop designed to run hot, oversized fans assumed, but they can spin as high at 6900 RPM. But also concerned with heat, so that is why settings are turned down. SU10 did something to cool the game down more, and when minimized, (like its predecessor FSX) game now must return resources to system because fans slow down even more, bring back active and immediately spins up.

NOW, XP-12 is running hotter, but that seems to change every update (weekly), so not messing with settings until they are done, and final product has been released.

MSFS on the other hand, changes every SU or even WU, so constantly have to check and tweak things. One person says one thing, another person says something else, and if new recommendations are released, one update and all changes as Asobo is still tweaking core code to optimize game.

IMHO should have been done in the prerelease phase, as well as known bugs alpha testers mentioned, but were not fixed. This sim is a work in progress and has a lot more “fixes and tweaks” before it’s mainstream.

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It’s a totatally different animal since then, just compare performance to now and of course DX11 is still there 
 As I mentioned above there are no preset performance caps but it’s not at all difficult to implement them should you desire.

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Just undervolt as said. In MSI Afterburner I have “only” power set to 95% and it stay cool and consume less watt. I OC at the same time so got even more perfs than stock. And if you don’t have any frame caps (limiter, vsync, etc.) the sim does what you asked for: full throttle on all components.

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welcome into the future
 Reduce your game settings if your pc airflow can not bring the heat out of the pc case if your system run at 100% load. Its not a fail of any game that it use 100% of your system.

PS:: and the simplest setting: set a usefully fps max limit for your system
 vsync can also be helpfull.

then I no longer wonder about reports in Warning: Your graphics device has encountered a problem :joy:

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Have not seen it since turning off HAGS here to the point I’ve slid every possible setting to the right and flown at 2fps a few gb over my descret VRAM with no message and no crash.

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yep
 HAGS is big trouble maker, but if its works fine ( and not let crash the whole system ) it increase also the load ( it just give a bit more performance ). But I just had can’t resist as I seen the OC :sweat_smile:

Your hint with “proactive” fan curve is good in generall. Most users have it running too slow. Little increase in ‘default’ rpm bring often lots more airflow into the case and avoid that the case becomes slowly too hot , or that the fans then must work at 120% and trying to cool down the overheated pc.

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It’s true, not all games display the same on Ultra. We say that FS2020 is an AAAA because it surpasses everything we’ve seen so far. I ran it on a 1070TI on high and ultra but the board temperatures weren’t that treacherous. I like to see it in maximum quality, for that I have a large team, the only thing that I have been a little behind is with the video card since I acquired it at the worst moment of bitcoin mining, I was lucky to find this one at least . However, there weren’t that many negative comments about the overtemp of the hotspot yet. With new video cards just around the corner, we will have to wait and see how they perform. FPS is obviously not an issue for FS (beyond the difference in flight precision and touchdown accuracy, I’ve checked), however I feel Asobo should focus a bit more on polishing the operating engine, consumption has decreased in the menus but in general it is more demanding than it should be. I suppose that for XBox it is more optimized or it will not look as good as on PC considering the difference.
My computer is a Ryzen 9 5700X, 32G DDR4 Crucial, 2 NVME 1TB Kingston, 1 SSD 1TB Kingston A400 on MSI X570A Pro, XFX Namakaze 1600W Plus gold power supply, xfx case, watercooling gamemax icechill 240 infinity, 5 coolers 12cm gamemax in push pull and the Radeon RX 6700XT graphics card. It’s not a small team, it’s not a poorly put together team (I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years) and if we compare it to an XBOX it’s way above it. The rest of the programs do not demand so much at all
 and by a lot of difference
See this article (use google translate) Qué debe tener un PC para estar a la altura de Xbox Series S, y cuånto costaría

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I’m reluctant to lower the setting. In my case, VSync worsens the operation, I’m with DX11, I’ve tried DX12 and it also works worse (Hello Asobo
 Switch to Vulkan as Xplane please).
Instead, I do notice the difference in quality by lowering the settings. IT IS NOT an FPS problem, I am between 30 and 40 with peaks of 45 (see the description of my team that I put in another answer please). Here we don’t have to settle for that, we have to ask for the graphics engine to be improved or to study how to do it.
When we had so many download speed problems in 2020, the solution the company proposed was “use a vpn”, “limit the download bandwidth”
 and you see, over time we went from 4K down to 12 and 20Mb without problems.
When the game crashed, the company’s solution was “reinstall everything again” where have you seen that? It’s the same as being shot in the chest and blamed for dirtying the criminal’s bullet with blood.
This is the same case, the burden of proof is reversed. My computer runs perfectly everything
 EVERYTHING I put on it, however FS2020 still does not work as it should, and that is not the user’s fault, that Asobo does not come out saying that we need an RTX 3090TI or the new radeon RX6950XT, what we need it is that once the program matures enough and it is not a continuous waste of money updating the equipment to see things as they should be seen 
 that is 
 GOOD

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what make v-sync worse ?

And of course it is a fps problem, in meaning of “more fps, more load”. Simple limit to a fixed 30fps MAX ( like the console it do ) and you get less system load - and not let the GPU compute allways whats maximal possible. Of course the settings you choosen have also an impact.

And the topic, your own , is so far I understand not about download speeds ( where I have zero issues ):

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In my experience of using two laptops and now two dedicated desktop GPUs, overheating is usually not a problem of a game engine. It’s a result of a poor cooling solution. My laptops had puny hd7670 mobile and mx450 GPUs back when I got them. But they were really poor at cooling them, my work laptops also have the same type of problem despite having very low end gpus, but after I got to to desktops with much more power hungry gpus but in an well ventilated case, they never reached those scary temperatures. My rtx 3080 used to run at 70-80 degrees most of the time. And my RTx 4090 is even cooler despite being much more powerfull. That thing runs at 65 degrees when the fans are spinning. Because, they have much better cooling solutions attached to them.

Now coming to how to balance this, a game engine will try to use as much resource it needs for the applied settings, or as much as it can get before reaching the resource limit. MSFS will use as much resource it can get from the system, if you don’t limit it somehow. And there is nothing wrong with that. Problem is, if a device is capable of using up 200watts but was not designed to cool 200watts effectively, then it will overheat.

Now what are your options?

  1. You can either put a lower power limit to your devices like CPU and GPU. But that WILL reduce peak performance.

  2. You can make adjustments to your settings so that it doesn’t use as much resource as in ultra and uncapped framerate. But you are unwilling to adjust settings, ok, then call framerate, for that you can use VSync, but that causes some judder in your system, ok, then don’t use Vsync, but cap framerate using an external tool like MSI afterburner and rtss. That should do the trick without using Vsync.

  3. Best but difficult to achive option: try get your cooling solution to match your heat output like you did by cleaning and reapplying the thermal interface materials.

At the end of the day you will need to balance your systems heat output and cooling capability. Option 3 is about adjusting your cooling capability, options 1 and 2 are about adjusting the heat output.

Even if Asobo somehow adjust the game engine to use less resources (i am not sure Vulcan is magic, Xplane is a different engine with different capability, it’s not apples to apples comparision), your system can still try to use full resources available by trying to run at a higher FPS. You have to cap that FPS somehow, it’s like putting the brakes on your car before it reaches top speed. Except most of us don’t want to put a brakes on our CPUs/GPUs so that we can achieve Max fidelity and performance. But if temperature is an issue for you, you have to accept that and aim for lower performance.

Although I am having a bit of trouble understanding why a card like 6700xt having cooling issue. Is your case well ventilated? As far as I remember from last round of AMD reviews, Navi 2x cards can have hotspot temperatures of near 100 degrees and they still should work fine, they are like that by design. But this was said by AMD. So don’t know if that is the actual case or damage control, not sure about that. May be it is cause zen4 CPUs are running at 95 degrees and Intel 13th gen CPUs are running at 100 degrees these days and that’s by design.

And to test the worst temps you can get, may be try running a furmark stress test. You will see temperature spike.

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And about needing to use higher end equipment, well it’s a evolving sim, if they add new capabilities, they will need further optimizations to free up resources or need more resources to run those improved effects. But as long as there minimum system requirements stays the same, they are not doing anything wrong by improving things that may need more capable hardware. Now if actual improvement is happening or not, well that’s debatable. I am sure they will optimize things when they can.

But I don’t see them using Vulcan, it’s backed by Microsoft, the creator of DX12 and Microsoft has very capable DX12 engineers who can help them out. They have no incentive to use Vulcan. Xplane uses Vulcan because it’s multiplatform (Linux/Mac) and Vulcan/OpenGL are the better alternatives in those cases.

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exaclty
 and it also not matter whether DX12 or Vulcan, both are similar low-level APIs and both are made for one reason : speed things up so that the whole system can fully utilized, what means again 100% system load and that means " sytem goes hot" , if users not limit some things :slight_smile:

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I think they should certainly look harder at making it a true multi-threaded core, from the test videos i’ve watched FS needs nor uses any more than 4 cores including running windows etc. It should never be cpu limited.