Noticing artifacts in 3d games...

[Vagrant0]

Been noticing some funkyness with my videocard the last week or so. When playing games I would have small sections look glitched out showing either black, or negative colors, or just flashing irrespective of textures and would change position when the camera is rotated. I've been noticing this in a few different games, based on different engines, so it is not an engine/software issue.

 

I'm using an old Radeon card, 4800 if memory serves. Is this a sign of the card dying, bad drivers, or that I should plan on cleaning out my PC in the near future. I was hoping to hold onto this rig for atleast another few months and was planning on gutting it to be used by a parent, but am having doubts if my videocard will hold out.

 

 

Any ideas?

[ZeroKing]

Seems like your card is dying. But to be sure, I'd try the following; I'm assuming it's a hardware issue:

 

- Take out the card from the slot, get a compressed air can and gently clean out the PCI-E slot (and the connecting pins on the GPU) and plug it back in

- Flush out accumulated dust in the heat sink of your GPU with compressed air

- If it still causes issues, then try a different PCI-E slot in your machine (provided you have one)

 

I can't help on a software level, but I'm betting it's a hardware issue.... since those types of artifacts are usually symptoms of card failure.

[Vagrant0]

Cleaning it helped slightly at first, but as soon as I started putting some real pressure on it it began to glitch out even worse. Decided to spend ~$120 on a slight upgrade (MSI R7 250x) rather than a steep downgrade for <$100. Hopefully it works out and will be a reliable card to replace the one I am (Sapphire Radeon 4890 HD).

 

Amazed at both how good a 4890 HD could be compared to even current mid-low cards, especially since when I bought it 4 years ago it was mid-range and something I had originally intended to swap out after a year or two.

[ZeroKing]

Agreed. I still have my old HD 5850, and it's still comparable to the mid-range cards of the current generation AMD cards.

 

However, I would've suggested to buy a R9 270 instead. Good deals on Newegg as well (comes with Star Citizen and Alien: Isolation): Sapphire Dual-X R9 270.

[Vagrant0]

Agreed. I still have my old HD 5850, and it's still comparable to the mid-range cards of the current generation AMD cards.

 

However, I would've suggested to buy a R9 270 instead. Good deals on Newegg as well (comes with Star Citizen and Alien: Isolation): Sapphire Dual-X R9 270.

It's a better card, but also $50 more for something I probably won't be utilizing for very long, and not sure it would work with my PCI 2.0 x16 slot. Being 2.0, it wouldn't be able to make use of the higher speed of the card.

 

My goal was really just to find a cheap card that I could still game with for a few months while I get a new PC build locked down. As this computer will be passed along mostly as-is, it made no sense to spend very much on just a replacement videocard for it when I am planning on buying better in the near future.

[ZeroKing]

PCI-E 3.0 isn't really useful yet. The most a GPU gains from using a 3.0 slot is roughly 4% boost in performance (roughly ~2 fps)...... just in case you wanted to know. Based on the technological advancements going on in terms of bandwidth and data transferring, it'll be a while before PCI-E 3.0 becomes a game-changer compared to PCI-E 2.0 (but by now, PCI-E 3.0 became a standard slot configuration).