Cildanus: I would be VERY interested to hear more about this issue and reasons behind it.
I found the original gamebox from storage few weeks ago and was going to start playing it again but then i saw this post.
I am especially worried as i do have exactly same graphics card (radeon HD 7850) and now i'm too scared to actually play the game. I did install the game and played it about 15 mins without problems but in your case issues started after several hours anyway(?). I did not do the ini file change as i had no graphics issues whatsoever.
So please, so more info about this so i could get back to one of my favourite games there is! :)

EDIT: forgot the question from original post, just to make things clear, did your issues start right away or after some time? I understood that it took several hours for problems appear? Or did they start right away and what kind of problems there were(before making the ini file change).

kdogprime: I know this reply comes a year after the last post, but I had a Radeon 5770 which would overheat while I was playing Jade Empire. So it's not out of the realm of possibility that repeated overheating damaged your 7980. I don't think this game had the best optimization, and I don't recall many patches ever been released for it.

Atlantico: AMD GPUs autothrottle if they got too hot, they can't be damaged through overheating. They just clock down if they got too hot, it's built into the firmware.

You have to override the GPU BIOS through flashing if you want to override the throttling. Jade Empire does not flash your GPU BIOS.

kdogprime: Then explain why that was the only game that ever caused overheating with that card.

Atlantico: You claim some outlandish thing, something that the hardware simply isn't capable of and I'm supposed to explain it for you. Gotcha.

The only way you can cause damage to a GPU through usage is if it is overclocked and the cooling fails. So then it's the user's fault anyway.

I'm not saying JE wasn't hogging your GPU, perhaps it did, I have no idea why and that's not the question - but your claim that it can cause damage to the GPU is nonsense.

Atlantico: You have to override the GPU BIOS through flashing if you want to override the throttling. Jade Empire does not flash your GPU BIOS.

kdogprime: Yet you were the one that made this claim...kdogprime: So I overclocked my card, so what? Regardless of that, I ran dozens of games on my 5770 and Jade Empire was the only one that ever caused heat buildup to the point where the GPU shut down.

BTW, don't tell me that repeatedly overheating a computer won't cause damage to it, because that is ridiculous. If overheating couldn't cause damage, then GPUs wouldn't be set to shut down once they reached a certain temperature. If you repeatedly overheat a computer component, it will eventually suffer damage to its electrical circuitry. This is common knowledge. I can point you to any number of articles that state this.

Ronin13: Hey all, this is a warning I wanted to pass along to anyone who owns a Radeon HD series card who's interested in this game. I have not found anyone else after days of searching on the 'net who has experienced this problem to the same degree I have, but I feel it is my duty to warn everyone regardless.

After installing Jade Empire & trying to run it, I noticed a number of graphical errors that eventually resulted in the first ever Blue Screen I've had on this PC, after nearly a year of heavy usage. I turned off every special feature available in my ATI Catalyst Control Center, tried running the game again & again, the PC Blue Screen'd on me. After doing some more research online, I found out that 2k Games' support site-

http://support.2k.com/hc/en-us/articles/201334043-When-playing-Jade-Empire-I-encounter-graphical-corruption

reports that texture corruption can occur when playing the game with ATI cards. I made the .ini file change that they recommend & then the game seemed to play fine for a number of hours. However, the next day I started to see the same kind of graphical corruption occur in *all* my programs & games, even including web browsers & the main Windows Desktop. I was able to try different ATI drivers with no effect and eventually the problem got so bad that the screen would go black minutes after booting to the desktop. Essentially the PC became completely unusable. Being a PC tech myself with 17 years of experience, I decided to troubleshoot the unit by replacing the graphics card with another.

The PC now runs completely fine with no corruption or crashing. Though I have not yet tried playing Jade Empire again. So, it seems that this game caused texture corruption to such a degree that it damaged my Radeon HD7850's video memory, rendering it broken.

I'm not badmouthing the game itself or GOG. I just wanted the community to be aware this is a serious potential problem.

kungfuagris: You came to the wrong conclusion- your ATI card was bad / failing before you started playing JE. It's just the game that you played at the right time to notice it. There's no way that a properly cooled card (i.e. doesn't overheat when running at 100% for extended periods of time) can be damaged by a windows game.

Ronin13: The card never overheated at any point, nor had any voltage issues. All my testing software couldn't find any problems with it. It's possible the memory on the card started failing within hours of me installing the game but that's a convenient coincidence. I know your response is logical & I appreciate you taking the time to write, but I've seen strange things happen with PC's over the years.

A couple examples- Back in '99 I was doing a monitor replacement for a client. An hour after doing so, I got a call that the PC (Win98) wasn't shutting down anymore. After trying a bunch of fixes with no effect one of our Network Engineers gave it a go & couldn't fix it either. On a lark I suggested plugging the old monitor back in. The Engineer poo-pooed the idea because there was no back-and-forth data transfer between the PC & the Monitor. But he was still willing to try it. The PC shut down promptly on the first attempt. Odd little issue indeed.

Something similar to this Jade Empire issue also happened with my audio card years back when I picked up 'Shogo- M.A.D.' after it first came out. I played the game for 5 minutes & lost all sound in the game & the entire PC. Switching the card to a different PCI slot fixed the issue, but Shogo killed the sound again when I tried to play it a second time. I had one more spare PCI slot to use but never tried the game again.

Even in this modern age, our PC's can be quite the 'Frankenstein's Monster' at times & we never know when they might turn on their creators. :-)