Many have already notice, but some might not. But luck so far is that none of the Sarah Kerrigan’s followers have been dining in fire, yet. It came to our notice that Blizzard had somehow, in some way forgotten to cap the frame rates of the game while you’re in the single-player’s menu, like for example the JoeyRay’s bar, the Bridge of the Hyperion and some others.

John Gillooly of PC Authority had also pointed out that the between-mission scenes – such as those onboard Jim Raynor’s ship – weren’t properly framerate capped.

“Certain screens make your hardware work pretty hard. [For example], screens that are light on detail may make your system overheat if cooling is overall insufficient,” Blizzard rep “Martyt” wrote in an official Starcraft 2 forum post.

Due to uncapped frame rates in these areas, your graphic card will keep on working overtime to burst out the best frames that it can reach, or repetitively re-render the background in a non-stop behaviour. This will cause your graphic card to reach sky high temperature and starts chalking out artifacts on your screen.

“This is because the game has nothing to do so it is primarily just working on drawing the screen very quickly. A temporary workaround is to go to your Documents\StarCraft II\variables.txt file and add these lines:

frameratecapglue=30

frameratecap=60

You may replace these numbers if you want to.”

“It may sound illogical, but redrawing the same image over and over again can put just as much stress on a graphics processor as running a game like Crysis with everything cranked up. As the pipelines within your graphics card work overtime, the card will heat up and if it can’t cope with that heat it will crash.”

Usually in such circumstances, graphic card manufacturers have an ‘overheating protection’ to shut down the card when reaching an abnormally high temperature.

“If a card runs hotter than it should, it will throttle back speed or shut down completely to avoid damage. Where this can become a problem is when cooling isn’t as efficient as it could be and the graphics card shuts down prematurely.”

“Still, the most common cause of overheating is dust. If your computer is designed properly it sucks air in through the front of the case and expels it from the rear and/or the top. With that amount of air comes dust, which builds up inside your case.”

“Once you are rid of [the dust] you’ll notice things running a lot smoother…[But this] isn’t a failsafe solution – sometimes overheating is just a sign that the product is old and worn out – a fan cannot spin forever after all,” he added.

Update:

Update 1.0.3 is now Live! Due to the alarming condition of this matter, Blizzard has thus removed this ‘bug’ with the 1.0.3 patch. However, this was not mentioned in Blizzard’s statement. But don’t get laid back just yet, as it might be a good exercise to go and clean up your rig and reduce the dust camping in your casing. Who knows, you might just increase your game’s FPS by one or two.