Drivers crashed....why?

ok to start off i got amd radeon 6770 graphics card.

when i was playing blacklight retribution the game crashed for the 2nd time(not normal)

so i decided to test if the game was fully crashed because task manager did not say the normal (not responding) description.

after about 1-3 minutes of messing around trying to minimize and maximize it the game fully CTDs and then

it notifies me that the graphics drivers have crashed/stop working. so first thing i think is ive been playing to long

so i check the temp of both the cpu and gpu and both were at 44 C which is normal this computer runs at.

then after checking both the desktop starts to spaz out flickering and having black lines.....is this

bc the card is going out? its only .75 of a year old.

one contributing factor is it has only happened to that game so far and

that i changed settings in the game.....more details on this >>

i changed the fps limit to uncapped and i was running an easy 55 - 60 fps

i think i also enable multi-sampling or antiscopic(i forgot which and if i spelt them right  )


but my main question is what caused this? does uncapped FPS cause this? does over heating cause this?

or does the card going bad cause this?


also what is the average temp for this graphics card? i seem to run without lag up to 50 C and after that i have to shut down for a while

bc i top out at 20 fps (this has only happened once or twice earlier this summer)