As someone else said, switching on vsync might help. Often, if the graphics card is being UNDERworked it can send frame rate very high - which in turn overstresses the card. Another game (also run by Scandinavians, this time Icelanders, and involving spaceships) had this problem a year or so ago - so badly that a few people sued the devs for melting their GPUs. This was in part because the nature of that game involved a lot of static scenes, and obviously that could lead to very high frame rates. I checked this a couple of days ago, and there is a vsync option in the advanced graphics control panel for Entropia. I suppose it's possible that it used to be on by default and a recent VU switched it off. One supporting bit of info for this hypothesis is that, as reported above, more static scenes make the GPU hotter.
Under normal circumstances this won't happen - if the card isn't being utilised it just idles over, otherwise it'd disintegrate your card when you are looking at a blank wall. Instances where a card flips out tends to be a combination of the card (or card series), driver version, specific way the software is rendering a scene/certain effects/utilising a specific 3D feature and other hardware/software interations in the rest of the system. I have had a couple of games over the years that exhibited a similar problem - one of them even had the card making very interesting sounds including what sounded like the capacitors whining If others with the same card are not having a problem then it is likely to be something specific to this particular persons system and troubleshooting that is quite difficult. Ideally the person will have another card they can test with, or a fair amount of time and patience to rule out as many potential causes as possible (including a potential format and re-install of the bare minimum only). It could be something specific to their graphics card + motherboard combo, the BIOS might need an update, their system drivers (e.g. motherboard) may need an update or their power supply could be inadequate (this does cause bizzare problems sometimes). It could also be that their specific card has a manufacturing defect and may be on its way to failing. To help people investigate they can run dxdiag (the DirectX diagnostics tool), save the results, and post them here (or send them to support/arkadia if they are worried about privacy issues). - Deathifier
Try setting your particle effects quality a bit lower. Also if you dont have a physics card or card higher then GTX 460 set your Physics quality a bit lower.
Well changing settings may reduce the loss of frame rates but I think that gets away from the point regarding them and to an extent the op's post. Yes we can all change settings to make it perform better but the basic jist is that there is something wrong with what they did with them to begin with to give this much a performance drop in the tp. It also does not address the fact the op's friend is having issues only on Arkadia and not else wheree in EU. I gave my input on tp's as a refrence to point out a similar issue to part of the op problem. I run a I7 920 with an ati 5770 full OC on both gpu and mem clock on the vid card and have 12 gig ddr 3 1600 mem. I shouldnt see that much frame drop even if particle physics is a tad heavy for the tp effects. Add to that the recent 10 c boost in temps on a fully water cooled system when playing EU definately points to a major change somewhere that semeingly effects diffeent vid cards in different ways.
Very nice to see you guys trying to resolve this issue.. May I add, can you see if you can get MA to fix the Crossfire and SLi as well? For some reason or other, they don't have the system optimized to use either. My last support case came back as they are aware of the problem and are looking into it.. that was over 6 months ago!! lol ty again for all the excellent effort you guys are putting into this universe to make it a better place to play!!
