Artifacting, freezing and crashing in demanding games

[LennyPenny]

Problem 1: I'm about 20 hours into Rise of the Tomb Raider and all of a sudden I can't get into the main menu. As soon as I reach the main menu after starting the game, it freezes and crashes with "error_device_reset" and a display driver error.

Problem 2: in Mafia 3, the intro cutscene plays, followed by an 'in-game' cutscene (looks less nice than the first one). As soon as this second cuscene starts, artifacts flicker all over the screen, shortly followed by a freeze, while the audio keeps playing. After a short while, the screen goes black/grey with the Mafia 3 logo in the top left corner. At this point I can't alt+tab to the desktop, the only thing I can do is ctrl+alt+del and reboot. There is no error message at all.

Other games work fine: Oblivion, Hitman Blood Money, The Binding of Isaac, American Truck Sims.

Things I've tried:
-updating GPU and display drivers
-lowering the GPU clockspeed
-high performance power profile in the control panel
-clean Win10 install
-uninstalling Steam and all Steam games

I'm at a loss. I'm guessing it's either the PSU or GPU but I don't know how I can be sure. I'm having no problems at all except in demanding games.


Specs:
-i7 7700
-MSI rx480 gaming x 4g
-MSI b250m bazooka
-Seasonic m12ii evo 520w
-Corsair vengeance lpx 2x4gb 2400mhz
-Arctic freezer 13 CO
-Samsung 850 evo 250gb
-WD blue 1tb

 

[LennyPenny]

give atleast OCCT a try at first
you have a solid PSU and I still think it is a driver issue
Do you actually have to pay for that service? if no, let them test atleast GPU and PSU, though I dont know how they will test them and I may question that also

Tried it but I'm not sure if it worked like it's supposed to. Even at the minimum of 7 minutes it stopped by itself after a minute.

These are the results after a few minutes of Mafia 3:
http://imgur.com/8zCOGP3

 

[LennyPenny]

I download the free version of Driver Genius. It says there are 14 outdated drivers but according to the Device Manager there are no updates available. One of the outdated driver is the Intel chipset driver, which I'm 100% sure I got from my motherboard's website right after I performed the system repair/restore (not what the official term is in English).

EDIT: this is what GPU-Z says. Not sure it's helpful at all, just trying to provide information.

http://gpuz.techpowerup.com/17/03/23/wa4.png

 

[ahoj__]

as I cant clearly see the artifacts in your link, https://www.sapphireforum.com/showthread.php?25700-5870-artifacts could you relate to his issue?

 

[LennyPenny]

as I cant clearly see the artifacts in your link, https://www.sapphireforum.com/showthread.php?25700-5870-artifacts could you relate to his issue?

Not really, the squares that flicker on my screen are much bigger and look like misplaced pieces of the image, like parts of the screen are lagging. In the picture of the actual problem (I think it's the third link) I put 4 dots in the middle of the squares that I could see. Again, it may not look like much but stuff like that is flickering all over the screen until it freezes.

However, now that I'm actually able to play (on lowest settings), the glitches are just flickering black lines and shapes instead of squares. They're not all horizontal so I don't think it's actual screen tearing. I'll try to take a picture of it tonight (normal screenshot doesn't seem to pick it up), or maybe I can try to record a few second and post it here but I'm not sure what would be the easiest way to do that. Is there something like Imgur but for video?

 

[ahoj__]

before you package the parcel before monday, try Crystal Disk Info and Crystal Disk Mark on your SSD and HDD, aswell as the basics memtest64, prime95 and Furmark and post some resutls (which one crashes)

 

[LennyPenny]

before you package the parcel before monday, try Crystal Disk Info and Crystal Disk Mark on your SSD and HDD, aswell as the basics memtest64, prime95 and Furmark and post some resutls (which one crashes)

Test results are in:

1) Crystal Disk Info
SSD http://imgur.com/ugUuL3Y
HDD http://imgur.com/mVgyTRl

2) Crystal Disk Mark
SSD http://imgur.com/1JoRsYX
HDD http://imgur.com/ftUqXP6

3) Memtest64: 4 instances with 2047MB each. The fourth test didn't seem to do much, don't know if that means anything.
http://imgur.com/HePokdf

4) Prime95: all clear, no errors

5) Furmark
-no MSAA http://imgur.com/dZpHMES
-8x MSAA http://imgur.com/e1FHmhq
-benchmark came out fine too

Just for the hell of it, I took a few pictures of Bioshock Remastered because that's not running very well either:
-pic from the very first cutscene http://imgur.com/AncHxBS
-and shortly after (notice the glitches at the bottom as well) http://imgur.com/RiUPGJg

And to conclude, a short clip of Mafia 3 (the blurriness is just because of my phone's camera, the glitches aren't...):
https://youtu.be/i5WJpWjY9E4

 

[LennyPenny]

Btw, Rise of the Tomb Raider is still crashing with this error (link) before it has reached the main menu on lowest preset and AA/Vsync turned off

http://imgur.com/8X96kTL

 

[ahoj__]

These artifacts/flickering are actually an hardware issue - when overclocking, sometimes stress tests like furmark show no error, however, in games they appear - but I could be wrong and theyre driver related.
> Do you know someone to test a nvidia (mainly due drivers) on your system? Did you try running games with integrated graphics?

" I just remembered there was a sudden power outage a few weeks ago but my PC still worked fine afterwards, except for the graphics issues in some games which started cropping up a few days later. "
what do you mean? or, what happened in this situation?

 

[LennyPenny]

These artifacts/flickering are actually an hardware issue - when overclocking, sometimes stress tests like furmark show no error, however, in games they appear - but I could be wrong and theyre driver related.
> Do you know someone to test a nvidia (mainly due drivers) on your system? Did you try running games with integrated graphics?

" I just remembered there was a sudden power outage a few weeks ago but my PC still worked fine afterwards, except for the graphics issues in some games which started cropping up a few days later. "
what do you mean? or, what happened in this situation?

I don't know anyone who could lend me their GPU.

A few weeks ago, the power in the building suddenly went out for a minute while my PC was on, not sure why. It's not like we have bad circuitry. The PC did start up normally and in normal use I haven't noticed anything different, temps are normal and there are no weird occurences. The only thing that changed is that more demaning games aren't working properly anymore.

 

[ahoj__]

Id say it is definitely a hardware issue (failing graphics chip) > the graphic units/architecture on the rx480's run at stock clocks at their maximum

you wouldnt be the first and only one I know of who sold his rx480 and bought a gtx1060 instead
atleast RMA it, though it could be possible that the GPU fails within some time again

 

[adiec]

Id say it is definitely a hardware issue (failing graphics chip) > the graphic units/architecture on the rx480's run at stock clocks at their maximum

you wouldnt be the first and only one I know of who sold his rx480 and bought a gtx1060 instead
atleast RMA it, though it could be possible that the GPU fails within some time again

what is your source and proof of what you have just said about the rx480 ?

 

[LennyPenny]

Update: I sent the GPU back yesterday, today I got an email from the store saying they found out the card had shorted out and they're going to send it back to MSI. Hopefully that won't take to long and I won't be charged for their shipping.