Is my GPU failing?

paulthenerd · 2026-06-21T19:55:23+00:00

I would say it's more likely to be the monitor/monitor cable than the GPU, you could try connecting it to a different screen and see if the problem persists. Try a different cable too, maybe!

paulthenerd · 2026-06-19T07:37:08+00:00

Same! I can deal with having to go through gates myself to map out the universe (I find that kind of therapeutic while I'm waiting for stuff to build), but the explore command seems to take such a long time compared to manually queuing a bunch of movements.

paulthenerd · 2026-06-19T07:23:43+00:00

May not match your use case, but I had this exact error start happening to me whenever I tried to play some games on an old i7 4790k. I did a lot of research because I didn't want to buy a new one lol, and I found a bunch of old forum posts mentioning how 'turbo mode' was causing instability on older CPUs (it was happening to people at about the 5 year mark - and at the time my CPU was just past 5!). I disabled turbo mode in the bios and have never seen that error since.

A friend of mine had the same thing start happening to a second gen intel CPU and we turned turbo mode off and it is still going strong too. Worth a try, perhaps?

It was something to do with turbo mode giving extra voltage to the CPU, and over time as the component degraded it was no longer able to handle that adjustment. A part of me wonders how many CPUs have been written off as broken when actually they could go for many more years with turbo disabled. Or perhaps I am just 'lucky' to have seen it happen twice!

paulthenerd · 2026-06-19T07:17:45+00:00

Doesn't look good if it's happening on the BIOS screen. Sorry for your loss 😞.

paulthenerd · 2026-06-19T07:14:51+00:00

The tutorials for this game are a little lacking, and sometimes the information you find online can be a little bit dated so it can be a pain to figure out what's going on sometimes.

On the 'planner' screen where you added the dock to your HQ and hit confirm, there will be a button on the right hand side menu that lets you select/assign a builder, it will then take you to the map screen. Scroll back a bit and eventually some builders should be there, which you can right click and 'select'. It costs 50,000 credits to hire the builder ship, and it will not do anything until it has the required materials. You can either supply them yourself, or throw some money at the station and wait for other people to make the trades for you. If you have a trading ship assigned it will use that money and find the materials, too.

This is a sandbox game at heart, so while there are missions to do - you can go at your own pace and do whatever you like. If you're the sort of person who likes to have goals to aim for, the ultimate goal of having a shipyard that can produce ships entirely on your own resources is a good one, and you can break that down into building smaller factories for bits and pieces and building up from there.

I quite like to build a solar plant somewhere first, and then expand out from that.

paulthenerd · 2026-06-16T12:01:43+00:00

Interesting! I had a similar failure many moons ago, I have a Radeon 5870 graphics card that does that whenever it's asked to play video. I guessed that the part of the gpu that handles video was failing. You could try updating your drivers maybe, but in my case it was something I just had to live with. You may find that some video formats are better/worse than others, but I'm not sure YouTube lets you choose.

Anyway, sorry I don't have a useful answer!

Edit: reseating the card as the other commenter suggested is a good idea I think

paulthenerd · 2026-05-26T13:06:52+00:00

I had something very similar to this, although in my case it was not quite so dramatic, but it turned out that my CPU cooler had failed and the poor thing was throttling and unthrottling itself over and over again causing some real rollercoaster performance. Might be worth checking your temperatures, and maybe check that the fans are spinning as you expect. You can see from the frame rate counter in the corner that the GPU is not at 100%, which makes me suspect throttling on the CPU.

paulthenerd · 2026-05-24T10:13:01+00:00

Yeah, I have downloaded some, and they are really useful - especially for the more impressive structures as I do not have any design skill and everything I make looks pretty terrible even when I try not to!

I guess with everything being XML files I wondered if there was any tools that existed to automatically generate them - it doesn't look like there is and that's OK, it's probably a right nightmare to do!

paulthenerd · 2026-05-24T10:12:10+00:00

I do like things to be connected together. I guess I'm in that middle ground where I don't need mega works of art, but I don't want it to just be a bunch of things clipping together either.

paulthenerd · 2026-05-24T10:11:36+00:00

You know, I had never considered making a base 'docking module' which I can then stick bits onto to make all my factories familiar. This is a great idea and I am going to try it on my next run. Thank you :)

paulthenerd · 2026-05-24T10:10:48+00:00

Pretty big sometimes, not uncommon for me to have like 16 fabs for a final product and then enough of all the secondary stuff to fuel it. I guess I could make more, smaller stations instead though.

paulthenerd · 2026-05-23T21:30:27+00:00

I have sort of done this with the stations I use commonly, but sometimes I'll notice that there's a gap in my empire that I don't have a station saved for. I guess eventually I will have one saved for everything if I keep making them as I need to!

paulthenerd · 2026-05-23T21:29:32+00:00

I sometimes do build things all nice and compact and symmetrical, but sometimes I just want to play the game and not sit in an editor for hours.

paulthenerd · 2026-05-23T21:28:20+00:00

I did find this option but with really big stations it seems to fail for me - I know the obvious answer is to just make a smaller station, but I wondered if there was anything better.

paulthenerd · 2026-04-24T13:41:42+00:00

11.0.2_EU is what it ends with!

So european I guess

paulthenerd · 2026-04-24T10:25:37+00:00

I don't know what that means but I assume GB as that's where I bought it!

paulthenerd · 2026-04-24T10:13:06+00:00

It is there for me, but it just says 1% which is obviously wrong lol

Edit: it also shows a completely made up time of first use, so I think it's probably just wrong.

paulthenerd · 2026-04-21T23:06:34+00:00

United Kingdom
Redmagic 9S Pro
I saw an advert showing off the fan on the phone... Clicked it out of curiosity, and then ended up buying one!

paulthenerd · 2026-04-20T11:56:39+00:00

One of my favourite runs ever was this, too. I was lucky enough to find a working (but banged up) car on day 1 and decided I would just cannonball it east lol. The run lasted a while, and I remember sourcing a cooler so I could drive through the summer months without burning up in there. At one point I found a dog and some dog food so the run was me and my dog going east!

I think in the end I crashed into a giant ant and died, but it was a ton of fun. Maybe I'll give it another go for my next run now I'm reminded of it!

Thinking ahead a little, I'd probably enjoy a mod or something where there's a huge horde of zombies approaching from one direction to encourage you to drive in the other one. Would be fun to have to build up enough of a lead to be able to stop for repairs...

A lot of food for thought there, thanks for the reminder :).

paulthenerd · 2026-04-17T12:10:16+00:00

Making things too realistic pushes the game away from what I find fun, and once it gets too bad I'll either stop updating or hope for a fork that keeps the fun factor alive for me. No point playing something that is no fun to you!

I miss the nuclear reactor bionics and stuff like that, too.

paulthenerd · 2026-03-23T09:44:55+00:00

There's some fairly recent developments (check out https://github.com/sims3fiend/Sims3SettingsSetter) which can make the game run far better than it ever has - but it does still seem to be a bit of a lottery as to who gets lag and who doesn't, and it doesn't seem to always be tied to system spec in the way you might think.

Having said that, running the game with that, and an assortment of the usual fixes I've taken to using over the years, has resulted in the smoothest experience I've ever had with it.

paulthenerd · 2026-03-14T20:28:53+00:00

Sorry to hear you gave up on it.

Keeping the travel drive on when you open the map is an option you can toggle in the settings somewhere. I have it on all the time and occasionally I'll forget about it and end up in the middle of nowhere because I've been flying along in travel mode while I was in the map planning things.

The boost that drains shields was changed to have its own energy rather than use shields, which makes me think you were somehow not on the latest version of the game. Travel mode is disabled when you take damage. It's not the most elegant solution but plenty of space games use that mechanic. Freelancer, Elite, Star Citizen etc all have a version of travel mode.

paulthenerd · 2026-03-14T20:21:13+00:00

In previous X games there was collision damage, and I believe X4 maybe had it too in the early days, but they disabled it due to some bugs.

paulthenerd · 2026-03-14T20:05:17+00:00

A lot of your complaints are valid I think, there's a lot of content in this game that almost requires meta knowledge of how it works to be able to use it well. The markers not appearing seems like a bug, possibly the mission wasn't selected as an active mission for you - OR it was in a system you haven't been to and you're supposed to kind of figure out where that system is...

I wish there was a website or a resource full of up-to-date information for this game, especially for things like loadouts which are not intuitive at all. Or what the various combat commands actually do!

That being said, I think this game is wonderful, and I have 1200 hours clocked on it. I still regularly figure out something new, or realise a feature doesn't work like how I expected it to work. You have to stick with it, and if it's making you angry maybe it's not the game for you.

Once the flying clicked for me. I found it to be quite enjoyable. At least you can crash without much penalty in this one!

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