HD 7xxx drivers for flicker/BSOD fix

About half the time I'm in a FC3 session, a random part of the screen will begin to flicker and display random flashing colors. It's always about an inch square, and it stays in the same place on the screen wherever I look. It isn't part of the game world itself, almost as if it's under the screen. It doesn't go away unless I restart the game.

Since I'm at work, I can't see the youtube vids linked in this thread. Does this sound like the flicker bug being discussed here?

 

After reading techreport I decided to fire up my backup rig a Q8400@3.2GHz and GTX460@850/1700/4000, running on XP 32bit and compared it with my main, i5 760 and HD 7850 both at stock, running on Win7 Pro 64bit. Not quiet apples to apples but performance should be close.

Did a quick run of Skyrim and Guild Wars 2, used the same settings and I got to say although I was pulling more FPS with the i5 760 + HD 7850. My eyes were perceiving my Q8400 + GTX 460 rig to be smoother. Not quiet scientific, just two games, using different monitors. Certainly needs more testing. If your games felt smooth and you haven't perceived any smoothness issue upon reading the techreport article I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Just dug up that review, they were using Catalyst 8.921 drivers back then. http://techreport.com/review/22192/amd-radeon-hd-7970-graphics- processor/6

Here is the 7950 review back in January, Catalyst 8.921.2-120119a: http://techreport.com/review/22384/amd-radeon-hd-7950-graphics-processor/4

January:




Now:






Drivers maybe? Different test system.

Has AMD given a statement about this artifact/flicker issue? This is a far bigger issue than smoother frame-rate if you ask me.

 

I think so too. But yes there was some kind of response in the changelog of the latest drivers and someone quoted a AMD guy of some forum who said that this is top priority..
But the latest driver didn't fix anything for me...

 

Just registered to take part in this discussion, since I'm experiencing the same issues. They have been going on for a few months now, with wildly varying occurrences depending on drivers and games.

The issues are especially bad in Skyrim (with or without ENB), and also noticeable in Borderlands 2. I've pinpointed one particular place in Skyrim where I can usually get it to happen within a minute at most when kicking around on top of one of the Fort Neugrad towers. This is what it looks like, with playback slowed down a bit just in case the artifacts aren't obvious enough. This is running 12.11

After ignoring the issue for all this time, I set out this week to try and narrow down the issue. Since I run Crossfire, at first I thought that was the problem, so I tried isolating each card in turn. Each GPU has the same issue in this spot.

I can't really figure out one particular element in this scene that would explain the presence of artifacts. The polygon warping looks a lot like what I normally get when feeding bad vertex data (either due to a wrong coordinate order, or incorrect mesh formats) to a vertex shader, although in those cases it's a permanent issue rather than a one frame flicker. All it would take for this to happen, for one frame, is a single vertex coordinate being incorrectly calculated by the GPU and then you get a polygon warping all over the place.

I'll see if I can't catch an Intel GPA frame capture of the problem happening. Even with this very reliable repro spot it'll be pretty damn hard to trigger it at the right time, but it beats sitting around and speculating.

 

Win XP runs a good deal smoother than Vista/7 or 8. You could probably switch the 460 with the 7850 and the XP system would still run smoother.

Not that I heard. I would love to send my old 5850 into retirement yet I'm not buying a 79xx card again as long as the flickering isn't dealt with.

 

thats a matter of tuning. Once I install Win7/Vista I completely uninstall Windows search (which has a part in Search indexing) and the system runs much better if you dont use such searching featues.

I use to run system on rather legacy SCSI disks (expensive stuff, but much better what Sata can offer) or SSD drive.

Those tricks work better on Win7 than on XP. I would also prefer win 2000 over XP. But I have to say that running Graphics user interface on GPU is much better idea than running it on CPU.

 

At least a German hardware site has reported on the problem so far, it gives hope that other sites may do so as well:

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/AMD-R...Radeon-HD-7000-Probleme-mit-Flackern-1032935/

 

There are few ways how to suppress the flickering:

- running lower framerates (frame limiters, Vsync)
- Using higher AA and AF

Also some results from my testing with Skyrim:

I found "flickerspot" in Ivarstead. I was able to save the game and after load the game flickered anyways.

a) The flicker is visible when I am looking on the river and waterfalls from some angle.
b) Lower AA and AF makes the flicker more often.
c) When the game flickers its more probable that game will stop responding and fails when my GPU runs on 1065Mhz. Back on 1000 there is no such problem, but on other hand, games without flickering will have no trouble with 1065Mhz.
d) Memory usage and Vram usage does not grow over time - its not a memory leak.
e) when i move camera view less than 1 degree in any direction the flickering will stop. This says that it has much more to do with shaders as well. AF and AA are not responsible. Not even texture quality and/or format optimization.

There have been observer 3 main types of corruption:
a) Black flicker
b) White flicker
c) Missing texture/transparency flicker.

I believe I got it...

Each texture has RGBA values. Shaders can alter these values so the texture can be darker, lighter - simulating shadow or colored light, and also can change transparency (alpha channel).

Due some reason shader returns "absolute values" like 255, 255, 255, 255 or 0,0,0,0. this causes texture to be black, white or transparent. I just cannot explain why some such corruptions show some patterns...

I would start here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb147175(v=vs.85).aspx

 

I can confirm your video in COD MW2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xD0GCca41Y

In Spec ops -> solo play -> Alpha -> The pit, I get the same flickering and thats without even having to move. It appears pretty imidiate after The pit is loaded.

I have reported the issue myself too on 12.11 Beta 11:
http://www.amdsurveys.com/se.ashx?s=5A1E27D20B2F3EEE

Black ops still seems fixed. Had the same flickering there as in your video, but not anymore after 12.11 beta 11.

 

Played through Trine 2, no flickering at all.

 

did you have flickering in that game before? I think i had some so i wonder if it got fixed.

 

Black Ops is not "Fixed" per se; it's simply reverted to the code that was used in the 12.5b and older drivers. A very simple FPS test will prove it. Find a spot on a map where the FPS will drop under 100 with vsync off, but which is (oddly enough) apparently CPU limited (or SHOULD be cpu limited). I prefer using the map 'Crisis" and going into the Cuban watchtower (up the ladder) on the edge of the map, then looking towards and above the underground bunker area.

Now, get the following drivers, install them, cancel the installation, and extract the following files into their uncompressed forums:

12.5 beta (or 12.4)
Any current beta older than beta .11
12.11 beta

Cancel the install and then use the following command on the following files, in the folder that has the driver packages: (usually \packages\drivers\display\W86a_inf (or W8_inf)\Bxxxx

expand atiumdag.dl_ atiumdag.dll
expand atiumd64.dl_ atiumd64.dll
expand atidxx32.dl_ atidxx32.dll
expand atidxx64.dl_ atidxx64.dll
expand aticfx32.dl_ aticfx32.dll
expand aticfx64.dl_ aticfx64.dll

Only the first 2 files are 100% needed for direct3D usage. The other 4 should be copied just to be sure.
Copy the files to some folder that will tell you which driver version they came from.

Then if you want to test Black Ops, throw the files into the Black Ops executable folder (This can be used for any game where the main 3D executable resides in, for games that may have a 2D launcher and a separate 3D initializer in a different location, like League of Legends)

You'll find that the FPS at this location in Black Ops will be identical on 12.5b and older, as it is in 12.11 beta 11, and will be significantly higher on 12.7-12.11 beta 10 and older (where the flickers are really bad).

 

I played Trine 2 with all november betas and 12.8 driver and there were no such problems. Trine 1 had flickering artifacts until 12.11beta11.

And as i noticed - the only games, that were fixed with beta11 are Trine and Flatout 2.

Skyrim, GTA4 still flickers, and i can confirm 2 more games I played recently that definitely has flickering corruptions: Portal 2 (co-op) and XCOM

 

to Falkentyne:
That indirectly confirms that more FPS causes more flicker. But the FPS is only output. One loop within the rendering process is generating this error.

 

You're walking on thorns when you say that more FPS causes more flickers. Use one of the 12.7-12.11 (10 and older) betas and downclock the card to 250/500. You will find a massive decrease in framerate but very little to *NO* decrease in the number of flickers (at least nothing even close to conclusive).

Then (again on 12.7-12.11 beta 10), set your card back to the normal speed, and enable supersampling AA at that spot I mentioned. You should notice no FPS drop at all, but flickers even rarer than the 12.5- betas.

So it's not a "Raw" FPS problem.

 

Take it as a small percentual chance of miscalculation in rendering process. More loops, more errors per second. Less frames also causes the error to remain longer on screen. This is however beyond human perception, and I have no debugging tools to measure it.

But so far I am very interested in a way how AMD is moving from VLIW to "RISC like" architecture. Its completely different architecture. So far I believe they did a great job. Only single API is making trouble. However the most used one...

 

I can confirm the random flickering on Guild Wars 2 using 12.10 drivers (also some broken graffics/lines on the ground). I've got the VTX3D Radeon HD7850 1GB X-Edition and i also have to underclock the GPUs clock to 860MHz, otherwise the game crashes.

 

None with 12.10 and 12.11 b11

 

I have this flickering issue as well. It happens in just about every game I play (WoW for example) and I don't think there's a game that I haven't noticed it.

Using 12.11 beta HD 7850

 

Sorry, I can't confirm BO2. MW2 was the last CoD I bought and then, jumped ship to BFBC2 -> BF3. :Σ

But if you say so... Personally, none of my games has been fixed with the latest alleged fix on beta 11.