RX 480 Artifact. Corrupt Driver or Hardware?

[_danielpwils01]

I built my first PC earlier this year back in January. I have been extremely happy with it. When I initially installed all of my drivers, as per usual, I installed the latest drivers from AMD for my MSI RX 480 GAMING X 4GB, along with their Relive software. The Relive software had always been flaky, a lot of times it wouldn't launch and I would have to re download the software. Recently, I updated my Radeon Drivers to their latest 17.12.2 Adrenaline addition drivers. Immediately, I started noticing pretty major artifacts while just browsing the web. I did a system restore to return to the previous drivers and everything was fine. I thought maybe the new Radeon drivers were clashing with another software or program I had downloaded. A week later, I decided to try again. I downloaded the latest drivers and again experienced some artifacts, although these went away after a short time. Earlier today, I did a fresh install of Windows 10 to clean my PC after 2017. I downloaded all my drivers, including the latest from AMD, and once again, I noticed a few small artifacts. This time, my PC froze and my screen went black. I had to force shutdown my PC. After starting it back up, all has gone well since and I haven't noticed any more artifacts. Should I be worried? Does this sound like a driver issue or a problem with my hardware? Any information is appreciated. Thanks.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Can you post photo of those artifacts?

 

[Onus]

What browser do you use? If Firefox, DISABLE hardware graphics acceleration and see if your artifacts go away.

 

[_danielpwils01]

What browser do you use? If Firefox, DISABLE hardware graphics acceleration and see if your artifacts go away.

Using regular, good ol' Chrome.

 

[Onus]

I am not sufficiently familiar with Chrome (was banned at work until recently, which was good enough for me), but if it has a similar setting, I would try that.

 

[_danielpwils01]

Can you post photo of those artifacts?

Sadly, the pictures that I had of the artifacts the first time around were lost when I reinstalled Windows, and I haven't been able to capture any more as they haven't happened again yet. I can try to describe them though. Its pretty much black geometric like shapes, like triangles, quickly flickering on the screen. Sometimes it would stretch the whole length of the screen, other times it would just flash in the windows search bar, and sometimes its completely random.

 

[_danielpwils01]

I am not sufficiently familiar with Chrome (was banned at work until recently, which was good enough for me), but if it has a similar setting, I would try that.

I just looked and Chrome has a setting "Use hardware acceleration when available" that is currently turned on. Would it be this? I'm not sure though because the artifacts only started occurring after the driver update, and have since, as far as I can tell, ceased.

 

[Onus]

Yes, that's the setting. Try turning that off and see what happens. One of the reasons I switched to nVidia cards from AMD is persistent artifacting only in Firefox, and only if hardware acceleration was enabled (fwiw, the other reason was power usage).