Radeon 7970 digital glitches on desktop

[merk]

Upgraded from an nvidia card to a radeon 7970.

I uninstalled all the nvidia drivers/software and then installed the latest catalyst drivers.

So far I've seen some weird glitches on my desktop. I have two monitors. On my 2nd monitor if i left it alone for a few minutes it would get these weird little glitches that would appear, usually around the borders of any windows i had open. if i moved my mouse onto the screen and did anything, they'd usually go away until I left it idle for a few minutes.

And just now I had my mouse pointer go all weird - turned into what looked sort of like three periods on top of each other. And it would change depending on what I moused over or clicked. rebooted to correct it.

Never had any of these problems with the nvidia card.

Haven't seen any glitches in games yet.

Any suggestions?

 

[Accord99]

I uninstalled all the nvidia drivers/software and then installed the latest catalyst drivers.

Are you using the latest beta drivers? I had desktop corruption that would appear whenever my 7970 would be under a load. This started with Catalyst 12.11 and didn't go away until 13.2 Beta 4.

 

[sze5003]

Use driver cleaner pro in safe mode. Uninstall all drivers and install 13.1. I had these issues once but they went away as I wiped all drivers and used the latest stable ones.

 

[philipma1957]

I went to catalyst installed 13.2, but I un -installed 12.11 first. all is well now.

 

[SolMiester]

Don't you guys get tired of uninstalling/reinstalling drivers all the time?, is their not a driver database to help with this?

 

[sze5003]

It takes 2 minutes with an ssd

 

[SolMiester]

It takes 2 minutes with an ssd

That would be 4 at least wouldn't it, several reboots to uninstall, reboot,reinstall, etc for every driver change, and I do have SSDs...quick, but not as quick as VMs

 

[BrightCandle]

I think its rather annoying that their are so many bugs and that only the latest beta fixes them. But of course when that driver was the latest some poor people had to live with it for a month or more until the next slightly less broken driver was out.

 

[merk]

I currently have 13.1 installed - as this it the first time I've put an AMD card in the pc, there were no other amd drivers prior to 13.1

Does amd have a history of buggy drivers? It's been a long while since I've had an AMD card - several years - but i seem to recall the last one i had (in another pc) was a little flakey. I never had any issues with the nvidia card.

Someone else mentioned it might be due to flash - I know i had some flash playing during at least one of the screen glitches. I don't think I had any flash playing in a browser when the mouse pointer glitched, but it's possible.

So far today other then the mouse glitch before, it's been stable. But I also think I haven't opened any flash sites.

If it happens again I'll try installing the beta drivers.

 

[24601]

I have the same issue.

ATi/AMD drivers always suck. Always.

I regret my purchase of the 7970 a few weeks ago.

ATi/AMD needs to up their driver game so that NVidia has to drop their prices.

I miss NVidia Inspector.....

My previous 8800GTS320mB and 460 purchases were far more favorable experiences.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

I miss NVidia Inspector.....

Have you tried RadeonPro?

http://www.radeonpro.info/en-US/

 

[24601]

Have you tried RadeonPro?

http://www.radeonpro.info/en-US/

Yes, its bad.

You can't force MSAA on every single title on planet earth with it (without massive glitches).

WoT in Improved Rendering mode glitches out so horribly badly with forces settings in RadeonPro.

WoT in old Rendering Mode throws screen corruptions in the same way the Desktop screen corruption and Firefox corruption goes.

Crysis 3 works fine but that's because the MSAA implementation is built into the game itself.

Also having to use a third party program just to change my display timings is absolutely asinine.

Have to use that utility from 120hz.net just to change display timings instead of just opening Nvidia Control Panel (Forgot what it's called, I just remember right click desktop and select NVidia option )

Offtopic: How do you set your signature on this forum? I can't seem to find the option.

P.S. LMFAO just had my firefox glitch out completely and get segmented into 2 black boxes. ATi/AMD drivers FTW!

 

[merk]

i'm beginning to wonder if i should have gone with my original plan of getting the gtx 670 - the free games swayed me into buying the amd.

 

[24601]

i'm beginning to wonder if i should have gone with my original plan of getting the gtx 670 - the free games swayed me into buying the amd.

If you can hold out for the 1-7 months more it'll take for AMD to fix their drivers, the 384 bit memory bus and the 3 gB frame buffer should be far more future-proof on the pure hardware side.

That's what swayed me ultimately to go AMD this cycle. My 460 768mB taught me that memory bandwidth and capacity matter .

If, however, the directx9 issue in AMD's 7xxx series is baked into the hardware, then I'm gunna have to do some fraud or something to get my money back from ATi/AMD cuz I'm not gunna bear the burden of greedy people who release broken hardware.

And shame on the reviewers for not trumpeting this issue.

Just because their benchmark games aren't directx 9 doesn't mean that people are just NOT going to play directx 9 games on their 7970 and expect it to run without issue.

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

This is a thread that details the problem at length.

Since this problem has been since the launch of the 7970 its either baked into the hardware or ATi/AMD's driver team is just THAT inept.

 

[BrightCandle]

As the year went on it did become apparent that AMD had a lot more driver issues and needed more releases than NVidia. They both have problems obviously, no software is bug free but the outstanding list of confirmed bugs I maintain for both shows a much more severe list for AMD, game breaking priority 1 issues whereas the NVidia's never get above a P3 which means there is a workaround.

So for a lot of last year there was this discussion that there was nothing wrong with AMDs drivers, they had improved massively and I was sat there with these 7970's have severe problems, I was hitting multiple severe problems every day praying for the next driver release. That went on for 6 months until I ditched them for the 680's and then I hit one bug, when I installed Windows 8 last month. Its been totally carefree in comparison to the 7970's, I haven't had to switch off SLI once nor mess with profiles to get a game to work at all, its a totally different level of behavior. A lot less performance bugs in general. My experience might not be typical but I see the same bugs have come up a lot in these forums, I am/was not the only one suffering them.

My impression of the last year is that AMDs drivers have had a lot of problems and a lot of regression problems and new games have need new drivers to perform well. Its constant updates. My opinion is that AMDs drivers are still bad, have always been bad and they continue to have really big problems with the quality of their solution. Its a shame because the hardware is clearly superior and priced very well, but its rare you see more than a few percentage points of actual additional performance despite the fact it should be dramatically quicker (30% from a hardware perspective). NVidia seems to get more done with less hardware more reliably. It makes them more profitable and they charge you more for the privilege of having less hassle. If AMD ever gets the card to live to its potential it will be a great day, but its been a year and a lot of the problems remain. We just found out crossfire is effectively worthless with vsync off, I mean totally useless all the extra frames don't appear to the user. I mean seriously what QA does AMD even do on their drivers to ship that not just once but for an entire year and not notice? Speaks volumes to the quality of their driver releases.

 

[Tweak155]

Why do I smell a big ass RS response coming?

Anyway, I only have a 6870 that I can discuss and I can say I ran into issues with their drivers when I first got the card. I rolled to a previous version and it was hassle free after that. Just recently installed their latest with no issues.

So while not hassle-free, it was close enough for me. I went to a 560ti 448 and it was issue free from the start for a long time. The only issue I ran into months down the road was with WoW where maxing 2 of the settings caused my game to artifact and then "crash" (effectively it made the WoW screen transparent, but still active). I turned down those 2 settings and didn't have a problem since. I then got a 670 and I haven't had a single issue... yet... but it's only been a few days!

So, each side has had their own problem for me, but overall fixing NVidia's issue was less hassle as well.

That said when I went to buy my 670 I was actually looking for a 7950, they just didn't have any in stock. So I said what the heck and spent more on the 670. So far I'm happy with the card.

 

[sze5003]

I have never had the segmentation tissues. The issues I was talking about were when you left flash on and booted a game or maybe a small flicker sometimes.

As for the install I guess you don't need to uninstall the old drivers. I dunno I've always uninstalled software if I was replacing it with new versions.

 

[Despoiler]

Yes, its bad.

You can't force MSAA on every single title on planet earth with it (without massive glitches).

WoT in Improved Rendering mode glitches out so horribly badly with forces settings in RadeonPro.

That's because some DX9 engines use deferred shading. It's a limitation of DX not AMD's drivers. In WoT you need to turn off lighting and post processing to use MSAA and AF via Radeon Pro.

 

[NatePo717]

I get this all the time with 13.1. I'll have Netflix going on one screen and a flash video going on the second and I'll get these odd color blocks and what looks like corruption around the edges of open windows. Moving the application or minimizing one of the two open windows will make it go away. Very strange. All from a fresh OS install. Guess I'll try the 13.2 beta and see if it goes away.

Now if only they could get Windowed Fullscreen crossfire support in dx9 games... Would be nice to see that second 7950 in action.

 

[Mushkins]

If, however, the directx9 issue in AMD's 7xxx series is baked into the hardware, then I'm gunna have to do some fraud or something to get my money back from ATi/AMD cuz I'm not gunna bear the burden of greedy people who release broken hardware.

And shame on the reviewers for not trumpeting this issue.

Just because their benchmark games aren't directx 9 doesn't mean that people are just NOT going to play directx 9 games on their 7970 and expect it to run without issue.

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

This is a thread that details the problem at length.

Since this problem has been since the launch of the 7970 its either baked into the hardware or ATi/AMD's driver team is just THAT inept.

This has been a known and admitted by ATi driver-based issue for quite a while.

It was also completely fixed in the 13.2 betas. If you haven't downloaded them yet you should.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

It was also completely fixed in the 13.2 betas. If you haven't downloaded them yet you should.

Odd. I had massive issues with the 12.10's. A downgrade to 12.8 solved that. No issues so far with the 13.1's. My card is a 7870 though.

Might as well give the 13.2 betas a whirl...

 

[merk]

I get this all the time with 13.1. I'll have Netflix going on one screen and a flash video going on the second and I'll get these odd color blocks and what looks like corruption around the edges of open windows. Moving the application or minimizing one of the two open windows will make it go away. Very strange. All from a fresh OS install. Guess I'll try the 13.2 beta and see if it goes away.

Yeah, that is the exact problem i was having.

Since I've only tried the card on two games so far, I'm a little worried there might be other issues I haven't run into yet. Only games I've tried so far are skyrim and crysis 3. i'll have to try out borderlands and guildwars2 when I get home and see if those have any other issues. Got a few other games I bought on sale on steam that i haven't even played yet.

Regardless of how it works, i think next time around I'll stick with nvidia since I never had any issues with them. Or actually to be fair once in a very rare while the driver would crash, but windows was always able to recover without a complete crash or reboot. I'm actually wondering if i should try selling the 7970 and picking up a 670 instead. I doubt I can return it since I already used the free game promo.

 

[AnitaPeterson]

Is this a Gigabyte card, by any chance?

 

[merk]

Yes it is, it's this one
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814125413
GIGABYTE GV-R797OC-3GD

 

[AnitaPeterson]

There seems to be a problem with screen flicker on (some) Gigabyte cards... I saw the following information on Newegg about the 6450, see if it applies to your model as well:

"So - apparently on 12/18/2012, Gigabyte released a BIOS update for this video card that fixes, among other things, "Fixed screen flicker problem".

You have to go here
http://www.gigabyte.us/support-downloads/Utility.aspx?cg=3
and get the VGA Tools - Easy Boost
Then install and run it and follow the instructions here
http://www.gigabyte.us/WebPage/40/index.htm
to check your existing BIOS version so you know which one to download - F11 or F22. If your BIOS is F10, you need to flash F11 and if your BIOS is F20, you need to flash F22.

BIOS is here
http://www.gigabyte.us/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4171&dl=1#bios "