What do you guys make of these strange artifacts?

H

Hazel

Geek Trainee
Any input you could provide would be much appreciated. My basic system specs: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5, 2 GB, 550w PSU, 9800 GTX+

I should also add that I get nothing of the sort on any other games including Far Cry 2, FEAR 2, and Tomb Raider: Underworld to name a few, only on Crysis & Crysis Warhead.

Hopefully my card is not dying, I just got it ~6 months ago and it has hardly seen any use. I have tried many different drivers and my tower always stays nice and frosty on the inside. Thanks in advance.

Artifacts_Crysis.jpg
 
well, good news, i don't think your gfx card is dying, the answer could be something simple like increaseing the swapfile (pagefile) size, check the game documentation, what is you swapfile set to?

this also could be caused by a virus, what AV are you using ?

do a virus scan after you have updated the virus definitions

Edit: and also check you are using the latest dowloadable grx drivers, to be sure uninstall the old drivers & reboot then install the latest drivers

Edit: & with Crysis, have you appled patch 1.2 and hotfix 1.21, and with Warhead, patch 1.3
 
It could also be caused by the monitor itself. You can test this by setting your desktop to use a bright white background. Then choose a black screensaver in Windows, clicking the Preview button to activate it, and after a few seconds move the mouse to exit the screensaver. If you see the same problem, then it's caused by the monitor. If not, then we have to digg deeper :)
 
Thanks for the feedback so far, guys. I am fully patched, with a clean & current driver install, virus-free according to AVG and Avast, created a new static swap file of 4080 MB, at stock speeds across the board and can confirm my monitor is functioning properly after trying the white screen, black screensaver test. So far the issue is unchanged.

What should I try next?
 
^No worries.

Well the problem is directly related to FSAA in Crysis. With anti-aliasing disabled the artifacts disappear entirely. :ohah:

A work-around, but obviously not an acceptable solution. I have emailed EVGA.com customer support to see what they have to say about it. Hopefully I'm not headed towards a dead end here... it doesn't make much sense to me that the box my GPU came in has a big picture of Crysis on it, yet it won't display it properly! :unsure:
 
FSAA has a great impact in the performance of a game, and especially with Crysis. So I think that your graphics card can't handle it, or overheats.
 
^I don't buy that. :x: This is what the card was made for. It's not top of the line, but it is pretty decent and should have no problem displaying a little bit of AA. My old 9500 could display AA on Crysis no problem, and that wasn't even a gaming card.

On high settings (including 4xFSAA) I still achieve consistantly above 30FPS at ~70°C maximum. This is beside the fact that I can start the game while still in idle temperature, load up an offending area, turn on AA and get the artifacts, then turn it off and watch them disappear.

A 9800 GTX+ should display AA in Crysis with no problems. This card is used for benchmark comparisons (with AA included on half the charts) for newer GTX cards. They can get it to work, apparently... we'll see what EVGA has to say about it, though. Regardless, even if it couldn't run it well (which it does at the resolution I use), it should still not make my screen go insane when selected. Something is wrong, here.
 
When you see the artifacts, do you see an exclamation mark appear in the system tray? Or does there a message appear saying that the graphics driver has been reset?
 
No, I sure don't. There doesn't appear to be any other effects other than the artifacts on screen.
 
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