ATI Radeon 9800 pro Glitches

[NickCrocco]

Hey everyone. About a month ago, I bought a brand new ATI Radeon 9800 pro from newegg.com Everything was cool until last week. I started experiencing glitches while playing certain games (Vice City, City of Heroes..) I get little pixel dots flashing all over the screen, and I can sometimes see squares laid on top of the game. I flashed new bios for my motherboard (ABIT A17), updated my Direct X and got the latest Catalyst drivers, but it still did not help. The AGP is set for 1.6v and the video card is not overclocked at all. Here are some pictures to show my problem.

Screen Shot 01

Screen Shot 02

Any idea one what causes this problem and how I could fix it? Thanks!

 

[Evdawg]

see if ur graphics apeture is at 128 or 256... or try less updated drivers. 3.10's always worked best for me when i had a 9700pro


also, make sure u use drivercleaner2 to delete all ur old ati stuff and make sure u get a clean sweep

 

[SickBeast]

Those look like driver issues to me. Did you format since getting the 9800? I've heard tons of stories of people having problems w/ new graphics cards when they didn't format their computer before installing them. For some reason the driver situation can be a mess, especially if you go from nVidia to ATi. The only thing that I've seen that totally fixes the problem is a clean install. Sorry. :beer:

 

[NickCrocco]

Well, this was a new computer I built myself with a clean install of windows on it, so that was fine. I just uninstalled the old drivers and control panel, ran drivercleaner and then reinstalled and still get the same error. I probably have tried 4 different drivers and I get the same problem. The weird thing is that it just started happening about a week ago for no apparent reason. I wasn't messing with the drivers, overclocking, or anything. I'm beginning to worry it might be a faulty card, since everything I've tried hasn't worked.

When I asked the manufacturer of City of Heroes about the problem, they replied "The problem you are describing sounds very similar to one we've seen happen when the RAM on the video card is going bad." The card is brand new, so is it possible for a new card to just be a lemon so quickly?

 

[SickBeast]

Try the Cat2.5's, they were ATi's best DX8 driver set IMO. That should be fine for Vice City. Vice City is a DX8 game right?

Maybe check the Rage3D.com forums for similar issues. I don't think your card is borked; it really does look like a driver issue. There's probably a tweak or a workaround for your issues but you just don't know about them.

The 2.5's will be a PITA because you will be unable to run DX9 games. I suppose they're worth a shot for testing purposes though.

With GTA3 I had tons of problems on my R8500 back in the day, so maybe the problems carried forward. I have no idea about the other game though.

 

[NickCrocco]

Ok, I'll look around Rage 3D and see what they have. The thing I can't get my head around is why all of a sudden it would konk out like it did after a month of perfect play....

 

[NickCrocco]

Still no luck. I have looked at tons of different sites, and the only error that seems to match mine is that the video card is no good. I have replaced and re-replaced everything I could. All my temps on my computer are very low as well. I cannot figure out what the problem is....

 

[ptw]

For City of Heroes, there's a known issue with the latest ATI drivers causing things like "flashing" on certain surfaces.

I see the same thing with my Radeon 9700 Pro on certain walls, roofs, and doors. It's annoying, but definitely a software problem (whether it's ATI's fault or Cryptic's fault, I do not know).

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: NickCrocco
Still no luck. I have looked at tons of different sites, and the only error that seems to match mine is that the video card is no good. I have replaced and re-replaced everything I could. All my temps on my computer are very low as well. I cannot figure out what the problem is....

The white speckling in your second screenshot looks *exactly* like what I get when I OC the core on my 9800Pro too far. If this is a new card, I would guess that it is defective.

Also, that's not the texture flashing issue. There are a handful of textures in the game that 'blink' in and out on ATI cards (although it seems better with the 4.7 drivers and their last few patches), but it doesn't look like that.

 

[jiffylube1024]

Originally posted by: NickCrocco
Hey everyone. About a month ago, I bought a brand new ATI Radeon 9800 pro from newegg.com Everything was cool until last week. I started experiencing glitches while playing certain games (Vice City, City of Heroes..) I get little pixel dots flashing all over the screen, and I can sometimes see squares laid on top of the game. I flashed new bios for my motherboard (ABIT A17), updated my Direct X and got the latest Catalyst drivers, but it still did not help. The AGP is set for 1.6v and the video card is not overclocked at all. Here are some pictures to show my problem.

Screen Shot 01

Screen Shot 02

Any idea one what causes this problem and how I could fix it? Thanks!

Your card is f*cked - RMA it. You could try reinstalling the video drivers (after using Driver Cleaner 3.2 to totally get rid of the old ones) and you could try setting your AGP voltage back to 1.5V (what is should be at), but those are hardware issues you're having, for sure.

Those dots in the second picture are caused by memory errors (usually seen when overclocking the memory too far) and the lines are I believe caused by bad pipelines in the CPU/ too much heat in your GPU core (occasionally seen when overclocking the core too much, but not nearly as common as the memory dots issue).

Basically, you either got a defective card from newegg or it overheated and became defective.

This is why cards come with warranties - newgg or ATI should replace it free of charge, since you didn't cause the errors by overclocking too much or anything. RMA the card, problem solved!



Edit: sometimes core overclocks can also cause dots like in the second picture as well...

 

[SilverTrine]

First thing to try when ATi cards artifact is always to turn off Fast Writes in BIOS.

If Fast Writes is causing problems it usually causes crashes and intermittent artifacts in games.

Your problem looks like bad ram but its worth a try turning off fast writes.

 

[NickCrocco]

Yeah, I set the card to 4x AGP and turned off fast writes to see if that would work, but I got the same issue. Would it have been possible that the card overheated itself without overclocking it? My system runs pretty cool and nothing is overclocked at all. Either way, I guess I'll RMA it and get a new one, but the question now is should I get more fans for my system or just assume the card was bad on it's own?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: NickCrocco
Yeah, I set the card to 4x AGP and turned off fast writes to see if that would work, but I got the same issue. Would it have been possible that the card overheated itself without overclocking it? My system runs pretty cool and nothing is overclocked at all. Either way, I guess I'll RMA it and get a new one, but the question now is should I get more fans for my system or just assume the card was bad on it's own?

While the 9800-class cards run pretty hot, they rarely have problems even in pretty warm cases unless the card itself is defective (or the stock heatsink is not making good contact). I'd start by just swapping out the card.

Do you see similar artifacts in other games, or in 3DMark01/03? You can loop the "Nature" bench of 3DMark01 with AA and AF enabled to put a 100% load on the card for an extended period of time...

 

[NickCrocco]

I tested some of my other games, all which gave me similar errors. In Vice City, the squares were very apparent and the white dots were also there, just not as noticable. I went ahead and filled out an RMA to get a replacement card, so hopefully within a week I'll have a new card that's not busted

 

[ZeroHr]

Had the same problem with Desert rats vs Afrika Korp and Doom 3.
Unistall the drivers restart the machine and install using the latest updates
I used 4.7 new 4.9 beta is out but got error messages when using xp pro
ran the 4.7 after uninstalling and everything is fine

doing a update on the drivers did not help the problem. Like I said I had to unistall the drivers than install the drivers using the newest version after rebooting

Running a 9800 pro AIW

never had any problem with ut 2004 or call of duty
just with the 2 games listed
it was in special lighting and shadows that I had sprite sparkle

 

[mushpuppy]

The artifacts are being caused by an overworked (i.e., overheated) video card. Since a 9800 pro should have no problems running either of those games, you should RMA the card and get a replacement. If they were being caused by Doom 3, I'd say either 1) add more fans/otherwise cool your card; 2) underclock it slightly to eliminate them. But, as I say, since it's a new card you should return it.

I doubt that changing drivers will solve this.

 

[NickCrocco]

Well, I RMAd the card and got a replacement one. As soon as I hooked it up and tested the games, everything was perfect. So it was a faulty card itself, probably with bad RAM. The thing that threw me was that it took a month for the card to mess up, without any overclocking or anything. I hope it was just the card, and not anything else causing the card to go bad. I guess time will tell, but for now, everything looks great. Thanks for the help everyone