ATI Confirms 5700, 5800 Problems; Promises Fix

AMD has confirmed that a previously reported issue of grey lines or screens with certain Radeon HD 5000 GPUs affects both the 5700 and 5800 series.

Earlier this week, it emerged that many 5000 series users were experiencing problems with crashing and grey or colored lines appearing on his or her display. The grey screens and hangups were occurring while users were gaming, watching movies or in some cases, when the computer was just sitting idle.

When users contacted customer service they were told the issue was caused by a Windows 7 update. ATI recommended a clean install of the graphics card driver as a possible fix, stating this had solved some users problems. The ATI Catalyst 10.1 release notes (published Wednesday) note the problem as a known issue; however, it's described as a problem affecting users of all versions of Windows and not just Windows 7.

Today Dave Erskine, an AMD spokesperson, informed us that, "only a small number of ATI Radeon HD 5800 series and ATI Radeon HD 5700 series cards are exhibiting the behavior," and that the team is closing in on a fix for the apparently software related issue.

"The team is testing a driver hotfix and initial tests indicate that it resolves the issue," Mr Erskine said. "We need to test it further but we expect to make the hotfix available shortly."