HD 7xxx drivers for flicker/BSOD fix

^Welcome.

 

Oh yes. THANK YOU!
lol

 

Just giving an example of what the Luigi is seeing with the 7800 series card in Skyrim on 12.10 drivers.

Normal


Artifacts




Note this is an extreme case of what can be experienced with the 12.10 drivers.
These artifacts seen are constantly flashing very fast when standing in a specific area where they first occurred.

 

I'm not sure if that's quite the same artifacts that most of us are seeing.
The symptom I have described is a single artifact every 5 - 15 minutes, or much more often depending on the driver that is used.

My flickering textures are certainly not constant.
The issue may very well be related, but I would think that your issue is more related to heat or some other hardware issue.

 

Would think it would be a hardware fault if this happened in every game.
Even a more GPU intensive game like Sleeping Dogs does not exhibit any corruption.
Bare in mind this is the worst example I could produce which is by walking around the front entrance of the Dawnguard Sanctuary with the 12.10 WHQL.
Otherwise the corruption would have been the generic black polys appearing up on occasion.

 

You're not alone. I get the same horrendous flickering with the 12.10 drivers. I didn't bother trying the 12.11 beta.

I reverted to 12.8 and everything's back to normal with rare flickering which happens ONLY in Skyrim

 

my old NV card looked like that when the drivers were ****ed up once. Although i did a clean install it looked like that skyrim examples. Only reinstalling windows did fix it. Uninstalling and reinstalling drivers didn't change anything.

 

There is small article about the flicker bug on a german page now (comparable to guru3d from what i heard)

http://translate.google.de/translat...chrichten-links-des-2728-oktober-2012&act=url

here's the link. It seems like we're not alone with that issue. let's hope about some reactions.


**EDIT**
Did anyone test if the flickering is gone when disable ULPS? Or could it be Temperature related? Some Cards do not have coolers on their vram.

 

In my case it certainly cannot be temps because I max at 45C.

Haven't tried disabling ULPS though, and have now tried with win8 but it doesn't help either.

 

Verified that disabling ULPS does nothing in TS2013.

 

Have people contacted AMD's customer care department?

I just tested aika online and found that you get random white texture flashes (like the black flickers but white instead) on 12.11's, which, of course, go completely away if you enable Supersamlping AA. The far less fps intensive Adaptive AA does not help, of course.

Copying the 12.4 or 12.5b driver D3D files into the game folder fixes 99% of the flickers, and you can play it with adaptive or regular AA.

So something after the 12.5 or 12.6 drivers caused these artifacts to appear. Still the question remains:

1) Why does Supersampling fix the problem? (It has NOTHING to do with lower framerate, otherwise downclocking the card to 150/300 would do more than just fix the problem--in fact, it does nothing).

2) Did ATI tweak the timings on the card (GPU or Ram) to gain speed boosts, which are causing a side effect? (since it doesn't happen in BF3, maybe this slipped under the rug?).

3) The Witcher 2 doesn't seem to respond to forced Supersampling (no FPS drop if you enable it in CCC), so this workaround doesn't help this game. Ubersampling in game doesn't help either, even though it hammers the framerate like Supersampling does (no idea if this is different from supersampling or not).

4) One thing I think everyone ignored or forgot, is my testing of COD Black Ops. In the 12.5b driver files there is very little to no flickering. But the 12.8 and newer drivers (which all have the flickering) load the precached maps MUCH faster (3x faster) than 12.5 betas and older. What would cause the maps to load faster? Is texture compression going on? Is that what is causing the artifacts? There used to be driver tweaks that would disable texture compression (which would cause vram usage to skyrocket) way back in the UT2004 days...could this be related? I did *NOT* test to see if enabling Supersampling causes the old "slower" load times to appear again or not. Can't even test BO Right now since the multiplayer connection is broken (Thanks, Sandy!)

Someone mentioned texture "******ing" awhile back and said that COD MW1 does NOT have streaaming (and doesn't have the flicker issue), while MW2, MW3 and Black Ops (which all have the flicker issue) DO have ******ing. But does Battlefield 3 have ******ing? Would be great if someone with more knowledge could give us some more information...

 

When i remember right. The flickering was already present with 12.4 that was the reason why i sent my first card on RMA just to get another one with the same issue.

It never was completly away as far as i can tell. Of course there are flicker-free games. But the games that flickered from the start still flicker. Drivers only seem to change how often the "artifacts" appear and never remove it completly yet.

 

Been playing Sleeping Dogs for over an hour.
This game heats my card up more than any other game out there.

My HD7870 reaches 75degC with this game and have not experienced any corruption that I could see.

 

Thats a bad testing game. Sleeping Dog is fine and flickerfree.

 

My last post was in response to graphical flickering/corruption being related to heat.

On average I get 65degC in games, a couple of which have noticeable corruption.
Skyrim & Tribes: Ascend.

Sleeping Dogs pushes the card the most, raising the temperature to 75degC with no signs of corruption.

 

Yeah, you're right; there was flicker in 12.4 in Witcher 2, but it was nowhere near as bad in other games as in newer drivers. As I mentioned, aika online is almost fully flicker free in 12.4 with normal or adaptive AA, but move to 12.11 and there are white flickers all over the place, which completely go away if you enable Supersampling AA!

COD Black Ops is flicker city in 12.11, but goes away if you enable Supersampling. Almost flicker free in 12.5b's without supersampling. But the maps load significantly slower.

The Witcher 2 and Serious Sam 3 don't seem to improve with older drivers. Sam 3 seemed to respond to enabling Supersampling (really need to test it more, as the FPS didn't seem to change), while W2 ignores forced supersampling completely.

I still want to know why Battlefield 3 is completely unaffected, while games as Ancient as Black Ops and Aika Online ARE Affected (just to show you how ancient Aika Online is, you can enable 24x Edge detect AA *With* Supersampling and still get over 80 FPS!), while Counterstrike Source, CS:Go and COD:MW(4) are unaffected.

I just want to know why Black Ops maps load so much faster in the D3D drivers where the flickering problem is severe...there has to be a reason or a correlation. I did do a mem size test and I think (it's in an earlier post) that the newer drivers use slightly less Vram and system ram (VERY slightly, not enough to make a map load 3 times FASTER) than the 12.5b's, but there is clearly something going on here. It's almost like some sort of texture compression/decompression...but even THAT wouldn't explain why you get flickers by standing in 1 spot and not moving....

 

Thats what i want to know too. The strange thing is that it seems like some games of the same engine can flicker but also can be flicker free.

As you said while CS-Source and TF2 are flicker free - In Portal 2 there was a map in the middle of the game i noticed 1 short flicker, Black mesa also flickers from time to time.

All games use the same Engine. I wonder whats the difference of these games that some cause flickering.

 

I can't recall specifics, but are you sure all those games use the same exact engine? There's different versions of Source Engine, and last I checked, Portal 2 had the newest version between the 3 games (I could be wrong though)

 

Hello guys, I have been facing the artifact issue myself. I am using gigabyte 7970 OC and running 12.11 beta catalyst. The problem is rare but it exists for example, i play dota 2 a lot so in 1 hour game i see artifact for like half a sec and then its gone. On the other hand, BF3 runs smoothly no artifact no flickers nothing same goes for metro 2033 no issue. I have faced this artifact issue in dota 2 and Alane wake American nightmare.

So kindly can anyone suggest if its a faulty gpu or driver issue?

any help will be appreciated.

 

The very fact that it doesn't happen, nor has ever happened in Battlefield 3, pretty much proves that it's a driver issue. And if it happens once an hour in DOTA2, then its safe to say that it's a rare occurance there, probably like it being rare in 12.5b in Black Ops. The real problem is how often it happens in COD Black Ops (after 12.5b/12.6 drivers) and The Witcher 2. It's often enough that it would make you think your card is defective.

As I mentioned before, I think a clue is, and a major clue at that, is how much faster the maps load (if already cached into memory) in the newer drivers (the ones that give bad flickers) in Black Ops, compared to 12.5b and older. The loading speed is like 3 times faster...that's a REALLY huge speed increase. And it has NOTHING to do with a smaller memory footprint either...I checked both the system RAM usage and Vram usage between both drivers (by copying atiumdag/atidxx32, etc, into the BO folder), and the memory usage was almost exactly the same (newer drivers had slightly less usage, but nothing significant).

So something is causing these maps to load much faster.

Now, someone did say something about texture str`eaming.
Is it possible that whatever this texture str`eaming is, the maps load faster because not everything is being accessed? If that's the case, how come the Vram usage is almost the same? Is vram space being allocated but stuff being accessed on the fly?

And how come 3dmark '11 (a rather modern benchmark) and '06 and Vantage aren't affected? Maybe it does happen in '11 but rarely enough that it's hard to spot?

this is an interesting theory, because in the newer drivers, with the faster loading, the FPS is also higher! (around 10 fps or so on average).

The driver release notes for 12.7 DID mention something about speedups in MW3 or another COD (Forgot which), so maybe we're on to something.

The fact that The Witcher 2 didn't change in FPS (From what I can tell) means that it was affected much earlier.

And I also noticed that Aika Online has higher FPS in the "white flicker" affected drivers than in 12.5b and older, although I can't see a loading speed
difference.

I could just be shouting silly stuff out of my head and spamming, but I still think it's worth a look, from someone who knows more about the hardware than I do.

Just did a round in CS:Go and didn't see any flickers there, either.
I think once we know what is 'special' about the games it happens in and why enabling Supersampling (if the game responds to the global ccc setting) fixes it can tell us why it's happening and what AMD can do to fix it.

It just seems funny that it doesn't happen at all in BF3, Heaven benchmark, 3dmark '06, Vantage or '11, but happens in a game as old as COD Black Ops (but not COD4).

The only hint mentioned is that COD4 doesn't use str`eaming textures while Black Ops, MW2 and MW3 all use str`eaming. I don't know what str`eaming is, but that stilli doesn't explain why you get flickers when you're not moving at all, in a custom private server with no players on it. And if it had to do with Vram size, BF3 would be the very first game that you would see it in, followed maybe by Witcher 2:EE.

Black Ops uses very little vram (<500k) though...