Graphical isses when playing games not sure if it is my monitor or graphics card please help!!!

[ar1speedboy]

I have a MSI R9 270 Gaming Edition with a stock clock of 955MHz, and after about a month and a half of use I decided that I may as well overclock it (free performance, so why not?). I downloaded Heaven Benchmark and started the overclock, increasing by 10MHz intervals and running the benchmark each time to test for instability. The benchmark had some issues with random horizontal lines flickering in certain areas of the screen, but since this was happening at stock speeds as well I figured it was just a problem with the benchmark and not my overclock.

Anyway I overclocked it to 1112MHz (without increasing voltages) and ran Heaven on a loop for 4 hours (and the temperatures never exceeded 70 degrees Celsius) with the only issues being the flickering lines. I then opened up Battlefield 4 and started playing when I noticed that the same flickering lines present in the benchmark were present here as well. They were never present when playing Battlefield 4 at stock speeds to I immediately returned to stock speeds, restarted my computer and played Battlefield 4 again but the flickering horizontal line issues still persist.

My first thought was that I had pushed my video card too hard for too long (without actually knowing that it was pushed to hard thanks to that useless benchmark) and that I had somehow degraded it despite never tweaking with voltages. However, when I tried to screen capture the flickering lines using fraps when playing Battlefield 4 I noticed that although the lines were clearly visible when playing they simply weren't there when watching the video I recorded, which makes me think that it may be my monitor at fault and not my video card.

Does anyone have any advice on what I should do in this situation? Is there any sure way to know whether my monitor or graphics card is at fault? Should I increase the voltage even though I am at stock speeds right now? Could it possibly be a form of screen tearing (my FPS never exceeds 60 in Battlefield 4 though and I am using a 60Hz monitor)? Thanks in advance!

I know that the lines may be hard to visualise if you haven't experienced them first hand so here is a link to the video I recorded on my phone to show the lines. It's bad quality but that's mainly my phone's low resolution camera. The lines should still be visible though. Also please note that this is a minor version of what I sometimes experience. It varies in severity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkIBWjrnUAQ&feature=youtu.be

 

[CraigN]

What monitor do you have?

That definitely looks like tearing. Make sure VSync is on in your games (or on the benchmark) to reduce this. If Vsync is on, then it looks like your monitor, not your gfx card. if it was your graphics card, you'd have persistent artifacting, instead of what your game is doing, which when its still, seems to return to normal, so your graphics card (and by extension your monitor) is producing the images accurately, but it seems like monitor is having trouble keeping up. I can't see any visual discoloration along the horizontal lines, just a mis-match of where it's supposed to line up, so I could be wrong, but I really do think it's the monitor.

Picture of tearing, is this kind of what you're getting?

 

[ar1speedboy]

What monitor do you have?

That definitely looks like tearing. Make sure VSync is on in your games (or on the benchmark) to reduce this. If Vsync is on, then it looks like your monitor, not your gfx card. if it was your graphics card, you'd have persistent artifacting, instead of what your game is doing, which when its still, seems to return to normal, so your graphics card (and by extension your monitor) is producing the images accurately, but it seems like monitor is having trouble keeping up. I can't see any visual discoloration along the horizontal lines, just a mis-match of where it's supposed to line up, so I could be wrong, but I really do think it's the monitor.

Picture of tearing, is this kind of what you're getting?

It was screen tearing, and when I turned on V-sync it went away. I think that Battlefield 4 is using a triple buffering method for V-sync, because when my frames aren't being cut from 60 to 30.

Strangely it only occurs in Battlefield 4, not in other games like Crysis 3 or Assassin's Creed III, so it's not that bag of an issue that I'll start switching monitors to find out what the problem is.

Thanks for your reply!

 

[CraigN]

It's probably just that Battlefield is either running at a much higher or much lower framerate than 60 FPS when you leave VSync off. What happens is if you're drastically lower (or higher) than your monitor's refresh rate, you're stuck with part of the last frame rendered and part of the next frame rendered, and that causes tearing. The closer you are to 60, the less tearing you will get.

V-Sync helps regardless of low or high framerates, because what it does is tells the graphics card after it renders a frame, to hold onto it until the next monitor refresh cycle. That way if the GPU is out of time with the monitor, the monitor just displays the same frame it already has in it's buffer again, then displays the new frame from the GPU.

If you aren't seeing it in Crysis 3 or Assasin's Creed 3, it's possible V-Sync was on by default, or your current settings leave you pretty close to 60 fps so it's not discernible.

All that being said, I'm glad to hear that your problem was only tearing, and not a monitor slowly killing itself Hope monitor testing goes well!