I have completed Mass Effect, after about some 30 odd to 40 hours of gameplay. Throughout the game, I encountered some really weird bugs which I hope they fix before they release the new content for it.
Bugs
For no reason, sometimes the elevator doors do not close, and I cannot proceed further. I can’t exit, I can’t move, clicking the mouse nor pressing any keys do nothing. This non-responsiveness can even happen midway through firefights too. I could pan my view around, and the enemies could be shooting at me, but I can’t fire back. I can press spacebar to bring up the squad command screen but I can’t issue any orders (clicking the mouse didn’t work).
Weird Issue
I came across a very weird issue, but I think it affects more than just Mass Effect. What happened is that lately I started to hear the CPU overtemp warning more often from my PC, and I have set the threshold to be 90 degrees C. That’s just 10 degrees below boiling point for water.
So I took my PC apart and cleaned out the CPU heat sink, which had like years of thick dust collected. The CPU fan was blowing into the heat sink (instead of AWAY, which is weird), so the dust all collected on the surface of the heat sink. Slowly I scraped the dust off, which had already formed a pretty thick layer and covering the slits between the vanes to conduct heat away. I’m guessing that this is what’s causing the heat to build up – the fan blowing into the dust on heatsink instead of into the heatsink to carry away the heat.
Once I had cleaned the heatsink out somewhat, I started the PC back up and tried to play Mass Effect. Surprisingly, this time it feels smoother! I loaded up FRAPS to check framerates, and my rates have increased by about 10 frames!
Now this is pretty weird because I had always thought that graphics were processed by the GPU on the graphics card, not the CPU inside the PC. However, just by cleaning out the heatsink and keeping the CPU cooler, it seemed I have gained 10 FPS on average.
How I tested was simple. Whenever we come across encrypted boxes or computer terminals in the game, we have a small mini-game where there are red and orange blocks rotating around a centre. Before I cleaned out the CPU heatsink, this is the only part of the game I hated because it would slow down to about 1 frame per second, sometimes less. Trying to crack open a safe is tough, and I have always kept a large supply of omni-gel on hand to open them quickly.
After cleaning out my heatsink for the CPU, suddenly this mini-game became PLAYABLE. I could now move my cursor to avoid the spinning red blocks! In fact the whole game just sped right up. I even did another video capture to show the difference in performance compared to the previous entry.
As you can see, if you compare the videos from the previous post, now there’s much less jerkiness, and the animations are now much smoother.
So I guess the cooler the CPU runs, the faster it is. I don’t know why this is, but the effects are clear. Perhaps when the CPU is hot, the circuits inside expand, so the signals take longer to travel through them. Millions of signals taking longer to travel around therefore makes the CPU slower. Now don’t quote me on this, this is just my own, and very possibly, misguided interpretation of the situation.
I loaded up ArmA, as well as Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 to have a go at them again, and yes indeed, both games felt smoother too. This just seems to confirm that a cooler CPU works faster.
So guys, if you haven’t cleaned out your CPU fan and heatsink in a few years, try doing so. You might just get a framerate jump like I did!
