Super high FPS in Scene Editor creates coil whine - Is this harmful?

[Mauschelbaer]

Hi, I recently built a new PC and now opened Unity again for the first time. I noticed that there seems to be a very strange and disturbing noise coming from the graphics card (RTX 3090). It’s definitely not the fans!

The effect occurs when I click into the 3D view in the scene editor and navigate around.

With Fraps I could see that this view suddenly increases to > 650 FPS as soon as I navigate.
I’ve already read that this syndrome is called “coil whine”. But I wonder if this could harm my graphics card in the long run.

I can enable VSync in the Game view so that only 60 FPS max is rendered (and this also affects the Scene Editor view) but as soon as I hit the “Play” button once and quit again, I have to re-enable this VSync option (as if Unity would forget that the checkmark was set). Is there any way to permanently set VSync or FPS cap? Or is this simply not necessary since it is not dangerous?

Thank you very much in advance.
Marc

[bobisgod234]

It’s hard to tell if it’s dangerous or not.

Coil whine could be caused by an overtaxed SMPS, or it could be a harmless artifact of that particular SMPS design.

[katemas3]

Go to Edit>Preferences>General>Interaction Mode and set it to “Monitor Refrech Rate”. This will stop GPU coil whine.

[AureFerreira]

@katemas3

Go to Edit>Preferences>General>Interaction Mode and set it to “Monitor Refrech Rate”. This will stop GPU coil whine.

Nice! You are the guy!
Thx.

[EchtJetzt_445]

@katemas3

Go to Edit>Preferences>General>Interaction Mode and set it to “Monitor Refrech Rate”. This will stop GPU coil whine.

You did literally save my life!! Loosing my mind over this error for a few hours!!

[Lo-renzo]

@katemas3

Go to Edit>Preferences>General>Interaction Mode and set it to “Monitor Refrech Rate”. This will stop GPU coil whine.

Wow could Interaction Mode be better named.

From the docs:

Interaction Mode
Specifies how long the Editor can idle before it updates. After one frame finishes, the Editor waits up to the specified amount of time before the next frame begins.

This allows you to throttle Editor performance, and reduce consumption of CPU resources and power.

For example, if you want to test the Editor’s performance, set this property to No Throttling. If you want to conserve power (for example, to prolong battery life on a laptop computer), set this property to one of the throttled modes.

In throttled modes, the Editor stops idling if you interact with it (for example, by panning in the Scene view).

Note: In Play mode, Unity ignores any throttling that you apply using this preference. The editor updates as fast as possible unless you enable the VSync option in the Game view, or set Application.targetFrameRate to a value other than –1.

Default
The Editor idles up to 4 ms each tick. If a frame takes 5 ms or more, the Editor doesn’t idle at all, and the next frame starts automatically.

No Throttling
Each time a frame finishes, the next frame begins immediately. The Editor never waits, and updates as fast as possible.

This mode consumes a lot of CPU resources. If you are using a laptop computer, it can cause the battery to drain quickly.

Monitor Refresh Rate
The Editor idles up to the monitor’s update rate in milliseconds. For most monitors, this is 16 ms.

Custom
You specify the maximum amount of time application can be idle.

When you select this option the Frame Throttling (milliseconds) property appears.