Artifacts in various games? Tested across multiple drivers. Video inside. (Update)

[The_Golden_Man]

There's a lengthy thread over at Guru3D full of people reporting very similar artifacts but no definite fix unfortunately.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=368290

I've read many of the posts in that thread now.. This is very disturbing with regards to Radeon 7xxx cards...

I will have this in the back of my mind before I recommend AMD 7xxx cards to people in the forums..

 

[Mezzanine]

I've read many of the posts in that thread now.. This is very disturbing with regards to Radeon 7xxx cards...

I will have this in the back of my mind before I recommend AMD 7xxx cards to people in the forums..

I have a Powercolor 7950 and I was getting corruption using the 12.9 beta but it seems to have cleared up, apart from an occasional desktop flicker, by rolling back to 12.8 though others are still getting artifacts with 12.8...it's weird.

 

[The_Golden_Man]

I have a Powercolor 7950 and I was getting corruption using the 12.9 beta but it seems to have cleared up, apart from an occasional desktop flicker, by rolling back to 12.8 though others are still getting artifacts with 12.8...it's weird.

Yeah, very strange.. Must be very frustrating not being able to isolate the problem and not having a clue on what's going on. More so people who RMA have the same problem with their replacement cards.

Edit: These artifacts reminds me of the artifacts seen in the Nvidia 7900GT series. It happened to alot of the 7900GT cards. Turned out it was the voltage controller for the memory that got faulty after a while. I had one of these cards myself. It failed after a couple of days. After reading how many people where affected by this problem I sent my card back and bought a Radeon HD 1900XT instead.

In other words, I relate these kind of artifacts to video mem problems. But seeing as older drivers fix it for some, one could wonder if it's driver related for these 7xxx cards. Maybe it's some kind of driver error overclocking the memory or giving it wrong timings? Who knows..

 

[BenSkywalker]

The new card has different artifacts, those are GPU artifacts normally associated with a bad overclock(memory artifacts are unique in that they will "black out" texture areas, GPU issues give "smearing").

 

[Kaleid]

I'm one of those with errors in some games, especially with Skyrim.

I ran OCCT for 3 hours straight with no problems and also this video ram tester.
Video Memory stress Test v1.7
http://majorgeeks.com/Video_Memory_Stress_Test__d5896.html

Could those of you who have trouble use this program too? I suspect memory too but for some reason this program cannot find any errors.

 

[Zoz]

-Not going to bother reading, because I don't need to - that video I just saw obviously showed a GPU either overheating or failing while playing DNF.
-Using Precision (or whatever AMD uses), lock your GPU fan @ 100% and see if it fixes the artifacts.
-Using Precision (or whatever AMD uses), undervolt your GPU by a small amount, and see if it fixes the artifacts.

 

[RussianSensation]

I got my card yesterday. The artifacts have not been fixed.

I don't know what to do anymore.

1) Keep GPU clocks at stock, crank GPU voltage to 1.20V in MSI afterburner, increase PowerTune to +20%. IF that doesn't work,

2) Lower GPU clocks to 600mhz at stock voltage. IF that doesn't work,

3) Lower GPU clocks to 600mhz and memory clocks by 300-400mhz. Try raising your memory GPU voltage by as well (there is a little arrow in MSI Afterburner where GPU voltage is that lets you adjust it once you enable Unofficial MSI overclocking mode).

4) At stock speeds try forcing SuperSampling in the CCC panel to see what happens. SSAA puts even more workload on the GPU. It could start storming artifacts like no tomorrow with SSAA if the memory or GPU are the problem.

Does the card not have any artifacts with Cats 12.4, only has them with newest drivers? Did you test this GPU in a friend's system? Maybe there is a conflict between your system and this card's BIOS. Since you got the same card, the BIOS on it is the same as the old card. There could be a system wide conflict perhaps? Would be good to test it on an entirely different system.

Do you get artifacts in Unigine Heaven or MSI Kombustor?

Can you try totally different games? For example, do you get any artifacts in Metro 2033, Crysis 2, BF3, Witcher 2, Starcraft 2, Medal of Honor? etc.

Have you tried the latest Catalyst 12.11 Beta 4s?

How are you uninstalling your AMD drivers? You should go into your AMD driver folder, double click Setup, go to Next --> Uninstall. Once the uninstall is completed, delete that entire AMD folder from C:, then restart the computer. Login and reinstall the new driver, restart the computer again.

Maybe Sapphire has a VRM quality control issue on those HD7850/7870 cards. I saw your previous screenshot for VRM max temperatures and there were massive spikes to 255*C according to GPU-Z.

 

[RussianSensation]

The new card has different artifacts, those are GPU artifacts normally associated with a bad overclock(memory artifacts are unique in that they will "black out" texture areas, GPU issues give "smearing").

Excellent point. Those last posted artifacts are not even flickering but massive image corruption.

"Often times when overclocking we find a video cards limitations not by driver crashing, but by visual anomalies that appear in game and ruin the image quality or fail to load textures. When we tried to overclock the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition past 1180MHz these anomalies showed up everywhere in both Battlefield 3 and The Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition. In Max Payne 3 we would just get driver and system crashes." ~ Source

Sounds like an unstable GPU.