Display Problem and Crash on Radeon HD 7870

[Red Hawk]

I just experienced a crash that I had never seen before. I was playing Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2 on my desktop when I started seeing corruption at the top of the screen. There were a bunch of thin, flickering horizontal lines across the top of the screen. I closed out of the game and started of the first Knights of the Old Republic to see if the issue was there too, and it was. So I restarted my PC, and the problem went away momentarily. I continued playing KOTOR 2, and a couple hours later the problem returned even worse than before. I closed out of the game and opened up Internet Explorer, and the whole screen starts flickering between a black screen and the desktop, and when the desktop shows there's still thin horizontal lines flickering across it and will often jerk up and down. A message on the taskbar displays an "AMD display driver has stopped functioning and has been recovered", but the flickering continues to the point where it was impossible to interact with the PC through keyboard and mouse. I hit the power button on the PC, which I have set to shut down the computer normally when pressed. So the PC shuts down, and I restarted it. In the few minutes since it's rebooted, I started up Internet Explorer and the flickering problem hasn't shown up yet.

I was running at the factory overclock of 1010 MHz/1210 MHz at the time. I'm running Windows 8.1 with the Catalyst Beta 13.10 (not sure which one exactly).

Anyone ever heard of this issue before, and know what might be causing it?

 

[AlucardX]

I've never heard of this happening. First thing to check would be temperatures of the card during 2D and 3D.

From there could try different display ports, I.e. try a different display port, or switch to dvi. Then try a different cable.

 

[Red Hawk]

I'm using DVI, not Display Port, already. Also the crash happened again, same as the last crash. I updated to the latest Catalyst beta to make sure it wasn't corrupt drivers or something like that.

 

[3DVagabond]

Did you check temps? Could need a clean out of the cooler.

 

[Red Hawk]

Right, and I can use MSI Afterburner for that, right? What temperatures would be an indication of something wrong there?

 

[Tohtori]

When playing those 2 old classics remember to set core affinity to just once core from task manager, graphics will break unless you do.

 

[tg2708]

I'm experiencing the same issues with my 7970 that of which has gotten progressively worse. I am RMA'ing the card though.

 

[3DVagabond]

Right, and I can use MSI Afterburner for that, right? What temperatures would be an indication of something wrong there?

There's no hard and fast temp. There are other components besides the GPU that can get hot and unstable. Judging by your answer I assume that you haven't tried cleaning the card? If not, then definitely do it.

 

[Red Hawk]

Ok, I pulled the card out of my system and cleaned it out with a can of compressed air. One thing I've noticed about the crashes is that they usually happen after the game (KOTOR 2) plays an FMV video. I can play for a while before one of the FMV videos starts playing without a hitch, but if one of the videos plays only a few minutes after starting up the game, the corruption issues happen and I have to restart the PC.

 

[3DVagabond]

If it only occurs in that specific situation it could very well be a driver bug. Have you filed a bug report?

 

[Red Hawk]

I haven't; if I keep seeing this pattern I will. It's a pretty old game though so I don't expect anything to be done about it. What confuses me is why the effect continues on the desktop even after closing out the game.