Red said:
My video process suddenly slowed down when I did multi-task video
processing. I touched the
AGP card, it was very hot. My card is old AGP has no fan attached just
an heatsinker. I know that
today video card comes with fan attached. So I manually attached fan
over the heatsinker, the slowdown has gone. Is overheated graphic
card slow down the GPU speed or not?
The driver can do anything it wants.
The video card has multiple hardware states. A
high clock/high power state, for computing or game play.
A lower clock/power state for being idle in the desktop.
The driver in some cases, even has control of fan speed.
In the case of NVidia, they released at least one bad driver,
where the driver did not turn the fan on.
When a video card overheats, if the driver is not working for
some reason, the card is unlikely to protect itself. The
computer will not shut off if the video card overheats. There
is no dedicated hardware signal for that. But if the driver
was still working, it has all the facilities available, to
do whatever needs to be done. That includes, running at the
reduced clock rate. Or even signaling to the OS to shut down.
The driver is in Ring0, and can do whatever is necessary.
It is up to the driver designers, to include any necessary
protection features.
Since video cards have failed, and melted the plastic
fan assembly on top of the card, that's proof the
features don't always work as they should.
Paul
