HD 7xxx drivers for flicker/BSOD fix

I wish that were the case with me. In my case, I get the issues even if I downclock the card down to 250/500 (!) And if I push the card (memory) too far, I get a GSOD. I don't get any extra artifacts.

Some of those black flickers shown on the vids are the exact same shape I've seen, basically a few of them look like they are in a "partially drawn square or rectangle" shape, or a J shape, or something.

Still no one answered the *BIG* question:
Why does this NOT happen in Battlefield 3? If there were physical problems on the card, you'd see them in BF3, which is about as cutting edge as possible. And why does it happen so obviously in COD Black Ops (A game which uses absolutely ZERO DirectX 10 features)?

And, are these "black flickers" related IN ANY WAY to the OpenCL Memory test errors? Also, this question was also NEVER answered by anyone here---has ANYONE with a 7x00 series card NOT have errors on the "Random blocks" test (if I recall it correctly)?

If you do NOT get errors on any of the OpenCL memory tests, post a screenshot, as well as the card (7x00 series) that you tested it on.

In BF3:
If I push the core too far, I either get a VPU recovery, or I get very long black lines or triangles (NOT flickers) extending away from gun tips or airplane noses or wingtips. If I push the RAM too far, GSOD.

 

Don't lie - your post was directed entirely at me.

The OP mentioned nothing about overclocking, I was the only person who even mentioned overclocking. You just don't like being corrected.

This thread doesn't revolve around you mister.





And I'm the troll?
Lol that's pretty funny considering it was you who started an argument with me before being told where to get off.
Btw please do add me to your ignore list, because if that means you won't reply to any more of my comments I'll be very happy.

 

Are you 100% sure about this?
For example
BF3, Sleeping Dogs, Syndicate, Warosw, Quake Live, Alan Wake American Nightmare, Teamfortress 2, Trine 2 = 0 Issues for me.

Starcraft 2, Quantum Conundrum, Portal 2 = rare flickering

So you may just not have notice it yet. You even can play Starcraft 2 for weeks and not have it and then BOOM! and you'll seet twice at 1 day and then it's gone again..
The "Problem" is just happening for a split second, you also may overlook it sometimes i think thats the reason why many people just ignore it.

I tested 4 different Cards (2 of my friend 2 of my own) all had the same issue. So for me its 100% sure that it is either a Mainboard Issue (we both own the z68 Pro 3) or a Driver Issue.

 

This one is my video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8erBOaOBck&feature=g-upl

you can try this...
update BIOS
update soundcard drivers
win 7 update doesnt do those for you, you have to manually update it

use 12.7 Beta driver, install all but do not install Accelerated video transcoding
I noticed when I opted to try 12.8 from 12.7 Beta, only 12.7 beta has an option not to install that...

then turn off all hardware acceleration in your browser.

with that, I had my longest run of a month and a week before experiencing the black screen problem again.

naturally I experience it by a week or two.

I'm a 7870 non-OC user.

currently I'm trying...
updating chipset driver
using 2 separate 6pin atx instead of the single dual 6pin atx

I do not experience that artifact problem on the other vids you included...

 

I guess you have a defective card, get an RMA.

7970M, 7870 desktop.

 

i have some flickering in cod bo. i run a sapphire refrence 7970 under water. at first i thought it was something to do with temps but after water cooling it max temps at 45 still had flicker. i run everything maxed in game except vsync and get minor flicker. i tried to mess with setting my no matter what its still there so i kinda gave up and learned to deal with it. also tried all drivers from 12.4 to 12.8 and still there. other games dont have it cs go metro 2033 mw3 dirt 3 and showdown etc.

 

Thanx. Anyone with a 7970 that pass this test? Mine does not, but most games are flicker free.

 

Guess it's kinda normal http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1675582&page=2

seems like everyone has this "50 Random blocks".

 

do flicker people use vsync? has it ever happened in dx10+ or ogl?

 

Flickering

My new Sapphire Radeon HD 7850 OC exhibits this exact flickering issue. Like other people in this thread, I've tested various driver versions, and the severity of the flickering does vary depending on which driver is installed. Of the drivers I tested, 12.5b and 12.6 provided the best results (very infrequent, or no flickering at all)... 12.8 is probably the worst offender.

Underclocking, and even reasonable overclocking of the GPU memory and core does not seem to affect the severity of the flickering. I've also tried removing my CPU overclock and relaxing RAM timings.

I did suspect that the GPU memory might be faulty and used memtestCL to test. Every (all 200 of them) "random blocks" test iteration gave errors and failed. All other tests passed with zero errors.

The games where I've seen the flickers:

All of the games listed, with the exception of Crysis 2 and PS2 Beta, are set to the highest graphical settings.

Unigine Heaven Benchmark also flickers depending on the installed driver version.

My system specifications:

I'm inclined to think that it's a driver issue, primarily because of how varied the severity of the flickering is between driver versions. But, after viewing many threads on various forums pertaining to this issue, I've yet to find anything that is conclusive. Consider this post as just adding to the pool of information. I will continue to do tests as I think of them. I intend to do a fresh install of Win 7 on another partition and test Tribes: Ascend, and then test the card in another computer if that doesn't bring up anything interesting.

A quick edit: I use vsync in all but a handful of games. But I did make sure to test with it on and off. Whether vsync is used or not does not appear to affect the severity of the flickering.

Unrelated/off-topic: Can we please keep personal disputes out of this? It will only distract from solving this problem.

 

the problem with that issue is that it looks quite simelar to issues caused by overclocking.
Also "flickering" is a "woolly word" there are 1000s people with 1000 different graphicards and i guess if you'll start searching for "flickering nvidia" you will find 1000 topics in 1000 forums.

I think we should try to constitute how "THE FLICKERING" looks like. And collect informations about the flickering Otherwise it will be hard to find a solution (even for AMD).

I'll start with my flicker expierience.

-It happens rarly and randomly and i can't reproduce it, sometimes it seems to be gone for 2 weeks and then it will appear twice a day.

-im not sure if it has something to do with windows-update but it seems like it mostly happens right after a windows update, can be a coincidence though.

-The flickering lasts only a split second and it's easy to overlook, first times i noticed it i didn't really know if it was really there.

-the flickering looks the same way in all games: its mostly a fast black "shadow" but it seems like in VERY FEW games it can also be white

-overclocking, underclocking, even replacing the card twice doesn't make any difference

-drivers versions seem to change how often the flickering appears in games but never really removes it completly

-it's not a texture flickering in the distance, it's more like artifacting

-it doesn't affect the stability i don't get any crashes, blue/black screens, or driver resets so far

-it does NOT happen in every game. From my expierience NEW and GPU-Intense games seem to be flicker-free (BF3 /Sleeping Dogs/ Syndicate). Old games like Quake 3 seem to be also flicker free. Games in the very middle like Portal 2 and Starcraft 2 are flickering. And it seems to happen more on some maps than on other maps (but im not sure about this). The funny thing is TF2(same engine as Portal 2) seems to be flickerfree (*knocking on wood*), maybe because it is beeing updated pretty often?

 

atleast you can game a little ...

for me i'm using 7730m ... if i run skyrim it crashes as soon as i hit load or start new game

now i have to use intel GPU on the lowest settings .... this is bull****

tried darksiders 2 , same problem

 

With Witcher 2 it's clearly driver related as there is no flicker with 12.6, but very noticable with 12.8.

 

Thanks. We need Tahiti owners testing their cards, though.

And there was a long thread on this on HardOCP so no RMA is needed.
EVERY Tahiti owner had errors on the random blocks test (and ONLY the random blocks test). There wasn't a single user who did NOT have errors on the 7970.

Your card is a Pitcairn.

BTW Mobile cards aren't in the same group (anywhere close, either) as desktops so 7970M doesn't count.

 

My card is pitcairn as well (7850), and I get the same random blocks error anomaly in memtestCL as well. Is that not supposed to be the case with pitcairn cards?

Regarding ClockClocker's post: "flickering" really is sort of a mismatched/'woolly' word to describe what is really more of a series of momentary artifacts.

For what it's worth, my experience with this issue is practically the same as ClockClocker's experience. Although, I have not had the card long enough to see if something like Windows Update has an effect on the problem.

 

Two very big questions:
1) Why doesn't Battlefield 3 exhibit any sort of this type of flickering at all?
2) Why doesn't COD 4 exhibit any of this sort of flickering?
3) The BIG question: How is it that one 7850 has this issue, but a second one passes MemtestCL (and thus doesn't have the black flickers?)
Is there a direct relation between passing MemtestCL and flickers?

What is so different about COD4 and COD Black Ops that makes Black Ops a bad offender (12.7/12.8 the worst, BUT loads maps much faster than 12.5b?)

 

Texture streaming?

I have a hypothesis that the momentary artifacts are related to texture streaming. I noticed that the games I've tried which make heavy, obvious use of texture streaming seem to have more momentary artifacts compared to games that either don't use texture streaming, or only use it sparingly. Keep in mind that I've only tried about 10 or so games so far. So not a significant test pool by any measure.

The first CoD game to make use of texture streaming was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and of course, Black Ops was the next CoD release after MW2. It could be that 12.5b somehow forced Black Ops to place all (or most) textures into VRAM instead of letting them stream in as they are needed, thus increasing initial map load times and reducing the probability of momentary artifacts. Please note that this is pure speculation on my part.

However, I would imagine that most newer games, including ones not affected by this problem, make use of texture streaming as well. Battlefield 3 included. So, I doubt that this hypothesis is correct, but it might be worthwhile to consider if it might be related to the 'flickering'. I'm honestly not even sure how one could go about testing this though.

 

Why not? 7970M is the 7870 and just as fast too. Exact same GCN Pitcairn core, so why wouldn't it count for 7xxx as is the title of this thread. This thread isn't dedicated to desktop 7970.

 

Oh i had no idea mobile cards used the same gen tech as desktop cards. Like the Geforce 580M was only about slightly faster than the Geforce gtx 460....(up to 470?).

 

Guys, the MOST IMPORTANT THING right now is to determine the correlation to the flickering to the Random BLocks test in the OpenCL tester.

We need to find out for sure, if all the cards that exhibit the black artifact issue also have the errors in "MemtestCL." And if any cards do NOT have errors in the test, and if the cards do NOT have the errors in memtestCL, are also fully black flicker free. Once we get this determined, we can find out if the problem is driver related or hardware related. (since RMA's dont seem to affect anything).

This thread also needs to be split up from the "BSOD/black screen of death" issue, since that is a different issue.