Question Artifacting in certain games: GPU or driver/game issue?

[BaaaaL44]

Hi everyone!

I find myself in a strange situation with my new rig, and I hope someone can provide some peace of mind, because this is driving me crazy. The rig is two weeks old, and configured as follows:

Gigabyte Z790 UD AX
i5 13600kf, stock speed
Sapphire 6800 Pulse, stock speed (boosts above stock speeds under load)
32GB Corsair Vengeance DDR5 6000Mhz
Be Quiet Dark Rock 4 (non pro)
Asus ROG Strix 850 Gold
Corsair 4000D Airflow with an additional Be Quiet Silent Wings 120 PWM High Speed as a front intake

Since the beginning, I have been experiencing some strange phenomena in certain games. These are the following:

- In BF 2042, when mesh quality is set to ultra, the hair and facial hair of certain characters in the menu and end of match screen flickers in bright blue/purple colors. The colors are always the same for each character, and it is reproducible by turning ultra mesh quality on/off. The error also seems to be reported by a number of people on the BF 2042 forums, and seems to be specific to AMD cards.

- In Baldur's Gate 3, when running the game in Vulkan rendering mode, I get flickering black squares during cutscenes in the right side of the screen, and sometimes random flickering colors/lights upon loading a save. Many others have also reported the same bug on the forums, also seems to be specific to AMD cards. Note that switching to DX11 rendering completely eliminates the issue.

- In Crysis Remastered the night sky does not render properly, all stars are flickering black and white, like an old/faulty TV screen. Changing settings has no effect on the phenomenon. GPU utilization is low (way under max clocks) and temps are in the low 50s. I have found a single other report of the exact same issue, running a 7900XT (also AMD). It is worth noting that when launching the game, it gives me an error message telling me to update my drivers because I'm using version 2.x.x.x. (something) even though I'm using the latest AMD Drivers, but then it launches anyway.

I get no artifacting in other games, even during extended periods of gaming, and my temps normally stay in the high 50s or low to mid 60s, even though this particular AMD card is rated to function perfectly even in the 80s. Core clocks are consistently high (max boost it allows is 2289Mhz (Stock clock is 2170), are not dropping, and 3D Mark regularly passes the stress test with 99.5-99.9 frame consistency, and a benchmark score slightly higher than average. No errors turn up in Heaven Benchmark or MSI Kombustor either, although I only ran them for a limited time. I also ran OCCT's GPU test with error deetction turned on, no errors were found during the 30 minute torture test, and the same is true for the VRAM test, also 30 minutes.

Now, I remember than back in the old days, when my Geforce ti4200 died, it started spraying random green blobs over every texture in games (started in Max Payne 2 and later everywhere), nut it definitely was not limited to certain situations in games, and were not reproducible.

Based on the above information, do you think this is a potential RMA-worthy latent hardware fault, or is it more likely to be a weird AMD driver issue, or driver/game incompatibility?

Thank you in advance!

 

[Lutfij]

I get no artifacting in other games, even during extended periods of gaming, and my temps normally stay in the high 50s or low to mid 60s, even though this particular AMD card is rated to function perfectly even in the 80s.
If the issues aren't shown on other titles, then it's possible that the drivers are at fault here. You might want to see if your motherboard has any BIOS updates pending. Then check to see if your OS is pending any updates. Following that, you could use DDU and remove all GPU drivers from your platform, then manually reinstall with the latest drivers off of AMD's support site, in an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator.

 

[BaaaaL44]

I get no artifacting in other games, even during extended periods of gaming, and my temps normally stay in the high 50s or low to mid 60s, even though this particular AMD card is rated to function perfectly even in the 80s.
If the issues aren't shown on other titles, then it's possible that the drivers are at fault here. You might want to see if your motherboard has any BIOS updates pending. Then check to see if your OS is pending any updates. Following that, you could use DDU and remove all GPU drivers from your platform, then manually reinstall with the latest drivers off of AMD's support site, in an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator.

Using the latest BIOS (in fact, I asked the system builder for an update even before shipping and Gigabyte Control Center reports the latest version) and I have a legitimate version of Windows 11 Home with no pending updates. I will try nuking the drivers using DDU if the issue turns up in other games, or starts appearing in games that have been artifact-free so far.

What I find strange is that all three of these issues are limited to a very well-delineated subset of the game (hair textures, sky, etc.) that is always reproducible and in all three cases, the exact issue has been reported by others, although not on a large scale. In the case of Crysis, I did not experience the problem on the PRO driver they shipped the PC with but I updated to the newer (10 month newer) Adrenaline edition because of the error message.