Color Dots during gameplay, why???

[TheDownyGirl]

Hey everyone,

I'm experiencing a rather strange issue that I either am too stupid to find on Google or it hasn't been addressed, yet. I'll start off simple and see if there's just a no-brainer answer, if not then I'll be glad to give more details.

Essentially all that happens is that very bright splashes of color will randomly flash on my display whenever I'm playing games with high quality graphics. I've played BF3 with not problems whatsoever, highest settings, but it has been occurring throughout my entire Serious Sam 3 playthrough. I thought it was just an in-game glitch since the dots are only ever yellow, blue or red -- the same colors the in-game items glow -- so I tried to ignore it. Then I played Alan Wake and it was happening with that game, too. It's ferociously more annoying in Alan Wake where the aim is to immerse the player and what-not. Bright colors are easily noticeable in the game's otherwise dark and gloomy setting.

The dots are about an inch wide, and they aren't always perfectly round. I run a GTX 570 with an i5, although I honestly don't think this is a hardware issue as this problem only happens in games and all of my hardware is quite new. Besides, like I said, I've run BF3 and Skyrim and The Witcher flawlessly, at the highest settings there is.

Does anyone have any idea what the problem could be? 🙁

 

[casualcolors]

Could be artifacting. What is the memclock on your gtx 570 set at?

 

[HEXiT]

as said its likely to be artifacts. but because it doesnt happen on all games its unlikely to be the gfx card and more likely badly optimized drivers... not all gtx570s are equal and some have little additions that enable them to hold factory oc's better. like better quality ram, solid caps and other bits and bobs... these can lead to variation on how well they respond to the same drivers. 1 card may work fine on 1 game but another card by another manufacturer may buckle... so try a different driver.

 

[TheDownyGirl]

I've attached my card's info, casualcolors.

I honestly don't know exactly what artifacts look like.

I'm always running Nvidia's newest beta driver, but I realized that there's actually a newer one out now, so I'm going to install that. It'd be great if it was just the driver, I really don't want to burn out my card...

Edit: I installed the newest driver and the dots are considerably less, I almost thought they were gone entirely, but then I saw a blue one. Still, changing the driver makes me think that it isn't a hardware issue. Again, I don't want to kill my card...

 

[casualcolors]

Youtube artifacting and you'll be able to see it. What is your voltage at? And your mem clock is not very high OC, but try reducing it to 950 (1900 in MSI afterburner).

Let me know where your voltage is at. I'm guessing one of the stocks such as 1.025 or 0.95v.

 

[TheDownyGirl]

Youtube artifacting and you'll be able to see it. What is your voltage at? And your mem clock is not very high OC, but try reducing it to 950 (1900 in MSI afterburner).

Let me know where your voltage is at. I'm guessing one of the stocks such as 1.025 or 0.95v.

A Youtube search doesn't come up with anything like what I'm seeing. Seems like most busted gpus throw a lot of random lines and fragments all over the screen, and much more consistently.

I'll check my voltage when I get home, but I'm quite certain I cranked it up all the way to its highest setting on Afterburner, which wasn't much higher than its default.

 

[mcnumpty23]

might be your overclock is too high on the gpu

though its pretty low on the memory

my asus gtx570 direct cu artifacts if i try to run at 900mhz even with 1.1v--fine till i try games or unigine heaven

benchmark then get artifacts if its an intensive game or benchmark

got it now totally stable at 855mhz and 1110mhz on the memory at 1.08v

 

[casualcolors]

might be your overclock is too high on the gpu

though its pretty low on the memory

my asus gtx570 direct cu artifacts if i try to run at 900mhz even with 1.1v--fine till i try games or unigine heaven

benchmark then get artifacts if its an intensive game or benchmark

got it now totally stable at 855mhz and 1110mhz on the memory at 1.08v

You artifact with core-clock related settings? I only ever artifact with mem clock OC'ing. huge core-clock OC's just causes vid drivers to fail and recover for me. And yeah, you usually need 1.1v minimum for 900+ core clock.

 

[mcnumpty23]

yeah its definately the core overclocking causing it--i overclocked the core 1st and left the memory at default

once i found the max stable core then i overclocked the memory--the memory could probably go higher as at

1110mhz i didnt get any issues at all--but i remember reading somewhere that if you overclock the memory too

high it starts error checking so no benefit going past a certain point

bit dissapointed not to get stable at 900mhz--but 1.1v is the maximum asus gpu tweak goes to

still a great card though really cool and quiet--but huge!

 

[casualcolors]

Wouldn't feel too bad. At 875 core/2200 mem you're passing stock GTX 580 benchmarks, for 150 bucks less.

 

[TheDownyGirl]

Just changed my settings to this:

and then played a heavy Serious Sam 3 session, the game which originally had the problem. I didn't see any dots at all.

I'm happy I now know what artifacting looks like and I'm very appreciative to the help that was given to me here. I'm relatively new to this so you guys were great! 😍

 

[TheDownyGirl]

Best answer selected by TheDownyGirl.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey