I don't understand why most seem to think that both can't be partially at fault. There's a clear trend in the cards that are dying showing that there's something going on at the hardware/firmware/driver level that's making certain models more susceptible as well as the high end of the 3000 series overall. At the same time it's one game that's killing them which shows that it's doing something that no other game does and from what I can tell it's not anything that benefits the user like better graphics simply pushing the cards harder.
I think in the early days of furmark it was more to blame for killing cards since it was pushing them in a way the designers had never anticipated, once the engineers started designing cards to withstand the abuse the responsibility shifted to them to make sure it actually works. I also don't think it's simply high framerates that are responsible for this since plenty of other games have had that issue(and still do) without killing this many cards. Edit: It might be interesting to see if some of these games that have super high framerates in the menu also cause these cards to die, I know they're still out there because I've encountered it fairly recently in older games but maybe there's not enough people running them on these cards to get any attention.
These days I do expect cards to have more protections that keep them from dying so it's fair to blame the hardware but if the game is doing something weird that was never anticipated then it shares some blame as well, how much blame each deserves in this scenario depends on what exactly the game is doing to trigger this and how hard it would have been to anticipate.
I suspect the game will get patched to fix whatever is causing this and that GPU manufacturers will add protections and/or fix design issues in future designs. Like with furmark it will mainly be because of the cost of replacing cards under warranty but they also don't want to deal with the backlash and this time they can't hide behind the fact that furmark isn't a game and was intentionally made to stress cards.
I think in the early days of furmark it was more to blame for killing cards since it was pushing them in a way the designers had never anticipated, once the engineers started designing cards to withstand the abuse the responsibility shifted to them to make sure it actually works. I also don't think it's simply high framerates that are responsible for this since plenty of other games have had that issue(and still do) without killing this many cards. Edit: It might be interesting to see if some of these games that have super high framerates in the menu also cause these cards to die, I know they're still out there because I've encountered it fairly recently in older games but maybe there's not enough people running them on these cards to get any attention.
These days I do expect cards to have more protections that keep them from dying so it's fair to blame the hardware but if the game is doing something weird that was never anticipated then it shares some blame as well, how much blame each deserves in this scenario depends on what exactly the game is doing to trigger this and how hard it would have been to anticipate.
I suspect the game will get patched to fix whatever is causing this and that GPU manufacturers will add protections and/or fix design issues in future designs. Like with furmark it will mainly be because of the cost of replacing cards under warranty but they also don't want to deal with the backlash and this time they can't hide behind the fact that furmark isn't a game and was intentionally made to stress cards.
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