Windows 8 + Nvidia

i know this is a long shot, have you tried locking the cpu back to a dual core?

i wonder if other people have the same issue with that card, i have not come across this yet.

Hmm, you know, I have not, I was wondering if the CPu was an issue too. I had it overclock originally, but clocking it back down to 3.2ghz from 3.5ghz did nothing, the issue was still there. Did not try locking the CPU again. I got rid of the video hitching by uninstalling the drivers and reinstalling for the billionth time and the mouse lag too. It is such a strange issue. When it all started, I was using the Nvidia drivers from the site 306.7, I think. The font on the tiles were blurry, but if you let the tiles sit for awhile without opening anything, they were clear up. When she would go to open her Mahjong game, the screen would flicker black randomly and the mouse would lag in all areas of Windows. When we would play any filetype via VLC, or any other software other than WMP, it would hitch/ freeze. So, I uninstalled, ran a driver sweeper/ cleaner, and went with the drivers on Windows update. This got rid of the hitching and video playback, but tiles would still go blurry and we would still get mouse lag. I uninstalled those and went with the integrated Radeon HD4200, all was perfect, except, when she played Mahjong, there would be missing graphic/ tile pieces in the game, plus she couldn't utilize dual display with the integrated solution, so, I went back to the Nvidia and decided, f*** it, we'll deal with blurry tiles for now, and voila! No more issues...as of yet.

haha, ya i have noticed with any driver from any vendor there is always an issue people get (at random) from release to release. they always end up being wierd issues too.

I manually turned on FXAA in the nvidia Manage 3D settings area, after turning that off Microsoft's Mahjong and Win8's Change PC Settings area were no longer black.

thanks that helped me out big time, no more black screen much appreciated.....