Laptop screen went green and fuzzy after one week of playing (Active Texture Management (Aggressive), Engineer and MJ mods are installed)

[50ck37]

Hi, I'm not sure if here is the right place to this question, so please (re)move it if it is not...

I had a wonderful week of massive playing on my laptop without much problem. Then I installed MJ and AggressiveMode.

Today the screen all of a sudden turned green and fuzzy (it was difficult to see, but possible if I tried hard).

Searching on the Internet, I saw that some people had this issue when playing games, which could increase the temperature and affect the video signal. The other and sadder possibility would be a faulty graphics card (in my case the card is onboard, as it is a laptop, so I would have to replace the whole motherboard). There's also another one: replace the LCD display.

I have opened it today but couldn't find anything unusual. After reconnecting the lcd cable the problem persisted. Well, this is getting really hardware now...

In resume: has anybody by chance had this issue with ksp?

The best flights to everybody!

Edited January 21, 2016 by 50ck37

[John FX]

I`ve had issues with graphics cards and KSP. It seems to run the GFX card as hard as it can, all the time which, as you say, causes them to degrade quicker but only in the limited areas that KSP uses. The card never registers it`s maximum heat but the fans run at full speed and the frequency of the card never drops below max which suggests to me that a subsection of the routines on the card are being used without any restrictions. To my mind this would cause maximum stress but only on part of the card. I`ve had a laptop fail completely and a GFX card on my main machine fail and another GFX card had to be underclocked for stability on yet another machine.

All of these failed while playing KSP. Three separate machines all having issues with GFX all while playing KSP is beyond coincidence to me.

Of course Squad won`t see this as anything but a unity issue and TBH I`m not sure they would be wrong in saying that. Doesn`t make the game any friendlier to your hardware though...

[sarbian]

Don't dump crappy hardware problems on the devs. If your PC can't handle a sustained use of its composants it has little to do with the software you run on it.

[adsii1970]

I'm playing KSP on an older HP 2000 model, with 8 Gigs of Ram. In fact, there are plenty of spots where I have literally worn the letters off the keys! I've always been conservative about what I run on my machine, particularly with mods. @sarbian is absolutely correct and what I would recommend is for you to choose your top five mods, get rid of every mod that expands the Kerbol system, get rid of all but the basic EVE mods (just the clouds and planetshine). If you are running B9 Mod, UNINSTALL IT because it is not very graphics card memory friendly (which is why it requires ATM).

If you're going to use an older machine then you must remember you have hardware limitations...

 

[katateochi]

Did the issue look anything like these?

I had a spate of this happening (most often while in the SPH/VAB, but it did happen in flight from time to time).  Whenever it happened there'd be a few moments of unresponsiveness followed by an overheat shutdown.  A simple update of graphics drivers fixed it.

 

[Guest]

7 hours ago, katateochi said:

Did the issue look anything like these?

I had a spate of this happening (most often while in the SPH/VAB, but it did happen in flight from time to time).  Whenever it happened there'd be a few moments of unresponsiveness followed by an overheat shutdown.  A simple update of graphics drivers fixed it.

 

You need to put that in fan works.  That is really cool looking!

[50ck37]

On 1/22/2016 at 9:17 AM, sarbian said:

Don't dump crappy hardware problems on the devs. If your PC can't handle a sustained use of its composants it has little to do with the software you run on it.

Noted. I just thought it could be related to some functionality that could be specific to some option of the game or one of the mods I am using. As the problem seems to be rare, it seemed like a good  opportunity to share insights. I'll just dump the crappy mods that add little and interfere more with the game playability.

[50ck37]

@John FX, it seems to me rather improbable that this could be a coincidence. What I would think is that there could be some specific options or configurations that tend to make the game crash.

@adsii1970, I'm monitoring both cpu and memory use while playing ksp and it seems to use 100% of one core and 1.7GB of ram only, so I think the problem is not related to scarcity of resources (but my machine is rather small, i5 with 4GB of ram).

@katateochi, it is very similar to these! I'll try and update the driver and see if it fix the problem. Nice ship, by the way!

Note: if anyone is having this issue, I'm using Debian 8 (jessie) and it seems to come and go. The way I make it go faster is by using the command xrandr. I'm not going to go further with this question, so if you have the problem send me a pm and I'll walk you through the steps.

Thanks everybody!

Edited January 25, 2016 by 50ck37

[John FX]

On 22/01/2016 at 11:17 AM, sarbian said:

Don't dump crappy hardware problems on the devs. If your PC can't handle a sustained use of its composants it has little to do with the software you run on it.

Trust me, my equipment is not crappy and is made of decent components..,

One was a new build for editing video. A machine that would run stable at full CPU and GFX card usage levels for days at a time rendering video would crash within a couple of minutes in the VAB.  Also, this has happened on not just the one PC but 2 PC`s and a laptop. YMMV.

If this is the case though there is nothing Squad can do about it. The issues would be caused by the rendering engine inside Unity. I have not reported this as a bug/issue and `dumped it on the Devs` because it`s either hardware that is nothing to do with Squad or software that Squad has no control over.

 

On 22/01/2016 at 8:02 PM, katateochi said:

I had a spate of this happening (most often while in the SPH/VAB, but it did happen in flight from time to time).  Whenever it happened there'd be a few moments of unresponsiveness followed by an overheat shutdown.  A simple update of graphics drivers fixed it.

Sounds familiar. Mine would just go a full screen of yellow. I underclocked my card to stop the overheat shutdowns.

Interesting how just the wrong sort of software was crashing your otherwise healthy hardware...

Edited January 26, 2016 by John FX