Black Garbled characters after 10-15 min.

[mokrunka]

Hey guys,
I have just started having this problem with BF2. After about 10-20 minutes of play, the game begins to get garbled black blocks all over the screen, rendering the game unplayable. The game does not lock up however. I think this must be a graphics card issue because I also have the problem in FEAR, although not nearly as bad, I can usually play FEAR without the problem occuring at all (overheating?) but the card is not running hot. Also the card is an ATI X1800XT 512Mb PCI-E. I have not changed any settings at all it is not overclocked, and I have updated the drivers. The card is only about 7 months old. ATI Tech supt. is impossible to deal with, so I came here.
Thanks in advance,
mo

[[R-PUB]MrD]

Re: Black Garbled characters after 10-15 min.

have you checked that the GPU fans run offs aren't blocked with dust? The system normally just blocks nearest the fan

[Scinto]

Re: Black Garbled characters after 10-15 min.

what Catalyst versions are you using?

[=98=]

Re: Black Garbled characters after 10-15 min.

The likelyhood is that either the card is overheating, in which case clean the fan or buy an aftermarket exhaust fan, or that your drivers aer corrupt in which case download the latest Catalyst drivers from ATI.

Clean out your cache so BF2 re-optimizes. I forgot how to do this so someone else explain.

[mokrunka]

Re: Black Garbled characters after 10-15 min.

I am using the latest drivers, CAT 6.12 I believe. Yes the fans are clean and working. I can't see why my video card would only last for 7 months.
thanks guys
mokrunka
Edit:
Also, the problem started before I downloaded the latest drivers.

[Scinto]

Re: Black Garbled characters after 10-15 min.

ive heard some problems with the 6.12's being unstable with certain cards,

uninstall them, be sure to delete the Ati folder on your C:\ and install the 6.11's

[Sandfrog]

Re: Black Garbled characters after 10-15 min.

I'm 90% sure your video card is overheating. It's overheated so much now that you have partially burnt up the GPU and are getting artifacts. Download something like 3dmark and stress your video card with it, if you get artifacts similiar to what you get in BF2, then it's time to get a new video card. Otherwise you need to update DirectX and your video card drivers.