Hi,
Today I received my RMA from Sapphire send by Althon Micro, I was very happy to receive it, and with outstanding care and making sure not even a hair touched the circuit board of the Video Card, I installed it checked that everything was perfectly seated and gave it a try.
At first I did not notice anything funny at all, then as I kept playing Guild Wars 2, about 10 minutes in, I finally realized those artifacts where still there!. Basically they are this very very fast flashing artifacts, often blue-color like polygons, but sometimes it is half the screen or a portion of the screen going either white or black, sometimes it is a complete texture going white. I do not see this issue in Diablo 3 or Starcraft II.
I also tried Unigine Heaven and although hard to see, I also see texture changing to white for split seconds... however I noticed something very rare when the benchmarking ended it listed my GPU as:
Intel HD 3000 Graphics 2048 MB
The log is like this:
18:09:40 ---- System ----
18:09:40 System: Windows 7 (build 7601, Service Pack 1) 64bit
18:09:40 CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz 3310MHz MMX SSE SSE2 SSE3 SSSE3 SSE41 SSE42 HTT x4
18:09:40 GPU: Intel(R) HD Graphics 3000 8.15.10.2761 x1
18:09:40 System memory: 4095 Mb
18:09:40 Video memory: 2108 Mb
18:09:40 Sync threads: 3
18:09:40 Async threads: 4
18:09:40
18:09:40 ---- MathLib ----
18:09:40 Set SSE2 simd processor
18:09:40
18:09:40 ---- Sound ----
18:09:40 Renderer: DirectSound Default
18:09:40 OpenAL vendor: OpenAL Community
18:09:40 OpenAL renderer: OpenAL Soft
18:09:40 OpenAL version: 1.1 ALSOFT 1.13
18:09:40 Found AL_EXT_LINEAR_DISTANCE
18:09:40 Found AL_EXT_OFFSET
18:09:40 Found ALC_EXT_EFX
18:09:40 Found EFX Filter
18:09:40 Found EFX Reverb
18:09:40 Found EAX Reverb
18:09:40 Found QUAD16 format
18:09:40 Found 51CHN16 format
18:09:40 Found 61CHN16 format
18:09:40 Found 71CHN16 format
18:09:40 Maximum sources: 256
18:09:40 Maximum effect slots: 4
18:09:40 Maximum auxiliary sends: 2
18:09:40
18:09:40 ---- Render ----
18:09:40 Renderer: INTEL HD 2108Mb
18:09:40 Direct3D11 desc: AMD Radeon HD 7800 Series
18:09:40 Found feature level 11.0
18:09:40 Found compute shader 11.0
18:09:40 Maximum texture size: 16384
18:09:40 Maximum texture units: 16
18:09:40 Maximum texture renders: 8
18:09:40
I see the rendered is Intel HD 2108 MB but the Direct3D11 is my AMD Radedon HD card, is this normal?, to be honest I just noticed this, so I am not sure, if this also happened with the previous card. When I am playing Guild Wars 2 I can see in GPU-Z how the card is at a 80-100% load and temp is at 55-60C so it is definitely getting used, not to mention my fps is pretty much perfect 60 fps.
At this point I really don't know what to do, and I feel very frustrated, here is my build:
HD 7850 Saphire OC (Default OC) currently running 12.8 WHQL drivers, CCC has everything at default.
i5 2500 K (Not OC, just turbo enabled to 3.7Ghz)
16 GB Ram Corsair at 1333 Mhz
7200 RPM Hard Drive 6GB/s
ASUS Maximus iV Gene-z/Gen 3 motherboard
Windows 7 Professinal 64 Bit
Changing drivers yields similar results.
This is what the artifacts often look like:
Also I found a video of someone having similar issues:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=...
Other people in the thread I found the video seem to have the same problem, but it is only a couple of people, most people running HD 7000 series claim to be doing flawless. Therefore not sure if it is a problem with the game engine or with my card or drivers...
I am really at lost here as to what could be causing this issue, I would gladly hear any suggestions/possible issues.
Thank you,
Oscar