Is this a dying graphics card of a messed up driver?

[Werne]

I've been having issues with my card lately, an XFX AMD Radeon HD 7770 Core Edition with AMD Catalyst 13.9 (also tried 13.11 beta and 13.4, no good). I'm used to green vertical lines and artifacts when the card is a gonner, but these kinds of problems are not something I'm used to seeing. The problem occurs on Windows 7, I installed it on a spare 320GB HDD to see will my games run well on it. Anyway...

 

When on stock clocks (1000/1125), the card achieves 15-30FPS in Fallout New Vegas, it should be able to run it at 60FPS but it doesn't. I'd even be happy with 30FPS but the framerate keeps jumping up and down between 15FPS and 30FPS making it stutter like crazy. But if I up the memory clock by 5MHz (1000/1130) the game runs smooth at 60FPS, the screen flickers (black diagonal stripes appear every 30 seconds to a minute) and the framerate doesn't drop below 60FPS at all. That doesn't seem right to me...

 

And it's not just NV that has these problems, all the games do, even the desktop flickers.

 

Another thing I noticed is that I can't for the life of me disable VSync at all. I disabled it in CCC, I disabled it in New Vegas ini, but it's still there. I monitored framerate with Fraps in a lot of games and the display is capped at 60FPS, as soon as it dips below 60 the framerate gets to 30FPS.

 

So does anyone have an idea as to why does this happen? I just don't get it.

 

 

 

EDIT: It would seem ANY change to the memory clock results in a huge performance boost. I used MSI Afterburner to change the clock and Kombustor to check performance, and the results are:

 

Memory clock: 1124 (-1MHz) - MSI Kombustor: 47 FPS

Memory clock: 1125 (stock) - MSI Kombustor: 8 FPS

Memory clock: 1126 (+1MHz) - MSI Kombustor: 47 FPS

 

What the hell?!?! And touching the core clock brings no difference what so ever, having it at 1000MHz or 1100MHz doesn't even give a frame more out of it.

Edited October 14, 2013 by Werne

[Thor.]

No just a bad clock, try to uninstall the drivers or whatever you may be using, and reinstall from scratch. Or reset to default, some cards hate to be overclocked beyond what is capable with stock boost or overdrive.

 

[Werne]

The card is on a stock frequency which is 1000MHz GPU core clock and 1125MHz memory clock. At that frequency the performance is pathetic, but when I change the memory clock, even by 1MHz, it gets a massive performance boost (and black stripes start flickering on the screen when opening/closing windows, etc). Observe the illogical...

 

Memory clock underclocked by 1MHz (1124MHz) - 47FPS in MSI Kombustor GPU Burn-in test:

 

Memory overclocked by 1MHz (1126MHz) - 47FPS in MSI Kombustor GPU Burn-in test:

 

Memory on stock frequency (1125MHz) - 8FPS in MSI Kombustor GPU Burn-in test:

 

This makes no sense to me what so ever... :mellow:

 

 

 

EDIT: Well, now I'm sure what the problem is, I don't know should I be happy about it or go cry though. It's the card, it stopped working altogether by going on a full fan speed tantrum for about 5 seconds, and then there was darkness. Upon reboot it wasn't firing up at all, no fan spinning, nothing on the screen, 100% dead.

 

So now I have to wait for 15 days to get a new one, lovely. Why does this s*** keep happening to me? :sad:

 

*sigh* Ah well, back to a Core 2 Duo with on-board graphics it is.

Edited October 14, 2013 by Werne

[Thor.]

You might need to increase voltage, sometime that can cause the issue.. If you have a radeon card open up the catalyst control center there is a overdrive option under performance and application, msi isn't the greatest wayo overclock radeon cards if you have one. Nvidia not to sure sense they usually don't like it anyways.

 

 

You can OC right in the catalyst control centre.

Edited October 14, 2013 by Thor.

[spz2]

Try a diferent catalyst driver , though be careful , these pieces of software often have lefovers when unistalled the usual way . I know for sure that to be the case for Nvidia , i'm not sure about AMD , do some digging on the internet . Some basic universal rules would apply to radeon like to Nvidia , for example disable all third party programs interfering with you graphic card ,overclocker apps, monitoring apps and so on , whatever you use in conunction with your graphics card disable it all before unistaling the driver. Also unistall all the stuff that came with the driver first and after that the main graphics driver, restart PC.... Then use a driver cleaner and select the proper filters , more than one filter needed because first you have to wipe out traces of other things that came with the main driver. I run Driver Sweeper Driver Fusion , and DriverCleanerDotNet ( best of the bunch ) , i run all of these in case one misses something. The i run CCleaner . Now it's safe to install a new version of Catalyst , sigh , i know ....But it's worth the trouble i can assure you , better this small hassle than a complete windows reinstall right ?