4850 texture flickering / artefacts

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Bipolarbear

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Joined
Dec 25, 2008
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61
Hi all,

Firstly, sorry for the long post.I have a strange but reproducible issue with my MSI 512MB 4850. Basically, when playing certain video games I get texture flickering / artefacts in varying amounts. With some games this is bad enough to make them basically unplayable, so is clearly something I’d like to rectify.

Some preliminaries:
-Q6600 @ 3.0, DFI Lanparty Jr p45, 550w Thermaltake PSU, 4GB Patriot Viper DDR2 800 @ 1033. Vista x86, MSI Radeon 4850 @ 700/1100.
-Artefacting is worst in Far Cry 2 and Bioshock, moderate but very annoying in Crysis/Crysis Warhead, Fallout 3/Oblivion, Gears of War, no artefacts in GRID, any Source engined game, Company of Heroes, GTA IV
-Furthermore, in certain games artefacting only appears under certain conditions. For example in Fallout 3 and Oblivion it ONLY occurs in indoor areas.
-In 3dmark 06 the artefacting is only apparent in tests 3 and 4, not 1 and 2

So far I’ve taken the following steps to try to fix the problem:
-Firstly, dropped the overclock back to stock. No difference.
-Checked temps, neither core temp, mem temp of ‘display io’ (whatever that is) reach over ~70c in games.
-Ran furmark on ‘xtreme burning mode’ w/ 8xAA and postprocessing to test for artefacts, no artefacts
-Ran ati artefact tester, no artefacts.
-Ran Prime95 and furmark together to check PSU is coping, no errors.
-Dropped CPU back to stock, no help
-Tried drivers 8.8, 8.9, currently on 9.2, no difference.

I did stumble across a similar issue which owners of the 38x series were experiencing and which was solved by disabling ‘PCIE downstream pipeline’ in the BIOS. However I have no such option in my BIOS.

The fact that it does not artefact under heavy stress/testing in some games yet does in others leads me to believe that this is a software problem / conflict. I’m hoping this is the case as I would really like to avoid having to RMA this as I have no substitute for it while it is gone.

Has anyone experiences any similar issues with their 48xx?

Cheers
 
did you use os drivers, the one that came on your cd, or did you update your driverset from ati?
 
Card was overclocked. Temperatures monitored, no volt mods.

I should note however that first thing I did when I got the card was run it through a 3dmark 06 bench on stock clocks fresh from the box and I got artefacting on the 3rd and 4th tests like I do now.
 
Card was overclocked. Temperatures monitored, no volt mods.

I should note however that first thing I did when I got the card was run it through a 3dmark 06 bench on stock clocks fresh from the box and I got artefacting on the 3rd and 4th tests like I do now.
 
Hmm, I'm not sure. It could be some sort of hardware/software incompatibility, but I'm inclined to say it's a faulty card. I wonder if faulty memory on the card would lead to those symptoms?
 
have you tried dropping the clocks (both gpu & mem) below stock? if everything works fine for lower clocks (let's say 500/700), then it's quite obvious that your card failed to work at stock clocks, and you should probably RMA it.
 
if you never saw artifacts before you overclocked the gpu then it's possible you damaged it when doing so. Also it could be a problem with your motherboard or some kind of motherboard/video card problem. I don't have much experience with dfi boards.
 
I guess this this thread might be old news by now, but I thought it would be good to throw this out there. I had this same issue with the texture flickers that inexplicably only happened indoors in F3 and Oblivion. (This was true even on bare-minimum graphics settings.) I never OC my pair of nvidia 8800 GTs, but they came factory overclocked. I downloaded nTune and reduced my speeds by 10% and F3 plays smooth as butter now on maxed settings. Just in case anyone is still having this problem.
 
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