Texture Glitches on (Nearly) Everything

Gently Benevolent

Right, so I've had this problem for a long time now, and I've decided to see if I can do anything about it.

Basically what it is is a texture problem. I'll boot up a game, then after a while (usually around 10 minutes) the textures will decide to have a severe psychotic episode.

Yeah, I suck at explaining, so I'll let these helpful English lions demonstrate my predicament:


Now, this happens in (nearly) EVERY damn game I own, to almost anything you care to name in whatever game it's afflicting. You can imagine my frustration. Curiously, it doesn't affect:
Deus Ex (and The Nameless Mod, but that's to be expected, really),
Any infinity engine game,
X-Com: UFO Defense, Apocalypse and Terror from the Deep,
Half Life 1 and its expansions,
Pretty much any very old game

Also, while it affects nearly all my games to some degree, there are some in which it will strike incredibly quickly (often with game-crashing consequences):
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines,
Hitman: Blood Money,
Civilization IV

I'm guessing that my video card just hates anything approaching a graphically-intensive game and can't handle them (which is weird, because I can play all of the "severely afflicted" games with very nice frame-rates), which causes it to freak out a little and cause my bug. Then again my guesses are rarely worth much. I've changed my video drivers a whole bunch of times, it happens on every one (I'm currently using the latest iteration of the Omega drivers for my card), so it isn't that.

Here's the speccy stuff:

OS: MS Windows XP Home 32-bit SP3
CPU: Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo T7400 @ 2.16GHz
RAM: 2.0GB Dual-Channel DDR2
Video Card: 256MB ATI Mobility Radeon X1900
Sound: Realtek High Definition Audio

Yeah, it's really not a new laptop.

If my pretty terrible explanation has missed anything, feel free to ask me anything about anything. I'll also probably download anything that any of you say might help, so if someone wants to steal my bank account details, now's the time to try.

Thanks muchly.

Foomy

Gently Benevolent wrote: »

. I'll boot up a game, then after a while (usually around 10

that sentence right there is like the keywords for an overheating problem, which happen really easy on laptops.

can you get us some temp numbers?

Gently Benevolent

Just switched out of a game of The Nameless Mod to check this thread, and I can tell you that the CPU is currently at 65°C. IIRC, the last time I checked after I came out of a Civ IV game it was at 67°C. Note that TNM runs flawlessly at that temp whereas Civ IV most definitely will not.

Foomy

Gently Benevolent wrote: »

Just switched out of a game of The Nameless Mod to check this thread, and I can tell you that the CPU is currently at 65°C. IIRC, the last time I checked after I came out of a Civ IV game it was at 67°C. Note that TNM runs flawlessly at that temp whereas Civ IV most definitely will not.

any data on the gpu temp or general case ambient?

if it's not a temp problem it could be ram maybe, or your vid card is just hosed (which totaly sucks on laptops, as there isn't an easy to replace a lot of them)

try running memtest (http://www.memtest.org/)

Gently Benevolent

'fraid not on temperature front. I've tried Speccy, PC Wizard, Everest and HWMonitor and none of them are giving me anything but CPU and hard drive temperatures.

I'll see if I can find the memtest disk I made a while back, if not I'll burn another one and report back.

Scosglen

+1 for overheating GPU.

Is there any way you can get at the motherboard and clean out the heatsinks with some compressed air?

autono-wally, erotibot300

also a laptop cooling stand might help, I have to use one myself

MrDelish

Install ATItool and run it right as you see this happen

My card was overheating but I didn't know it was actually the temperature until doing this

Gently Benevolent

Okay, left Memtest running while I slept. Everything's fine there.

Will definitely try cleaning the heatsinks. The cooling stand sounds like an interesting idea (albeit one I'll have to try in the future).

About to boot up Civ now, so I'll give the ATItool thing a shot shortly.

Gently Benevolent

All right, so the temperature monitoring function on ATItool (which I assume is what I'm looking for here) doesn't work on my card. It looks like my card just doesn't support temp-monitoring.

Stormwatcher

It's a textbook case of overheating, judging by your story.

Gently Benevolent

Good. At least I think it's good. I was worried that my card had just given up the ghost, at least overheating is something I can take steps to rectify.

If anyone has any suggestions for keeping the card cool, besides the already-suggested laptop stand and heatsink-cleaning, I'll be more than happy to hear them.

Stormwatcher

I'd have a lot of suggestions

If you had a desktop :P

But I have no idea how to improve that situation beyond "clean those vents".

EDIT: Oh and "don't put the laptop over an electrical blanket"

Foomy

Gently Benevolent wrote: »

Good. At least I think it's good. I was worried that my card had just given up the ghost, at least overheating is something I can take steps to rectify.

If anyone has any suggestions for keeping the card cool, besides the already-suggested laptop stand and heatsink-cleaning, I'll be more than happy to hear them.

cleaning out any dust and using a cooling stand are really the only things you can do.

But even if you do get it cool again, overheating can permanently damage a gpu and it may never work well again unfortunately.

if you give us the laptop model number, we can see how hard/possible replacing the gpu is.

MrDelish

Gently Benevolent wrote: »

Good. At least I think it's good. I was worried that my card had just given up the ghost, at least overheating is something I can take steps to rectify.

If anyone has any suggestions for keeping the card cool, besides the already-suggested laptop stand and heatsink-cleaning, I'll be more than happy to hear them.

The temperature tool is worthless. You want to run the artifact detector after it shows these crazy signs

Gently Benevolent

MrDelish wrote: »

The temperature tool is worthless. You want to run the artifact detector after it shows these crazy signs

Ah, okay. Will do.

Foomy wrote: »

cleaning out any dust and using a cooling stand are really the only things you can do.

But even if you do get it cool again, overheating can permanently damage a gpu and it may never work well again unfortunately.

if you give us the laptop model number, we can see how hard/possible replacing the gpu is.

Alienware M5790 (also M5700i-R2, apparently), got it as a present several hundred eons ago. The GPU's integrated which apparently means it laughs in the face of replacement, but I'm no hardware expert. Sucks that it might be permanently damaged, though, it's been quite sturdy in all other aspects.

Stormwatcher wrote: »

EDIT: Oh and "don't put the laptop over an electrical blanket"

So THAT'S where I've been going wrong! :P

Gently Benevolent

Here are the results from ATItool after Civ started acting up. If you want me to run it for longer or do anything else, let me know; ATItool is alien technology to me.

Stormwatcher

I don't think all those dots are supposed to be there.

Houndx

Those dots generally show up when your gpu ram is being pushed too far/overheating, but it's certainly possible that it's the gpu itself.

Blowing out the dust, as pointed out above, is one option. Your other options are to make sure the gpu fan is running at max - sometimes you can do this from the gpu driver dialog, or using third party software like Atitool - underclock your gpu/ram, or - and probably most effective - remove the heatsink, clean off the existing thermal paste and reapply something like Artic Silver. Factory applied thermal paste is usually not great stuff and never properly applied.

If you've never dismantled a laptop, you may not want to start now. If you do, see if you can find the service manual for yours. Dell, for instance, has them available for most models and they tell you every screw to remove, etc. Make sure to keep all the screws and parts you remove in a container so you don't misplace anything.

Edit: Also, try the forums at notebookreview.com Other users of your laptop may be experiencing this problem. You may be able to find a solution there.

Houndx

Double posting, but I feel like I should stress that if you've never dismantled a laptop that you should hesitate to start now unless you're prepared for it to stop functioning altogether.

Also, a bios update or rollback might be another option. The bios will control when the fan starts. Sometimes a newer bios will fix a fan issue. Other times a newer bios will introduce fan problems and you'll find that rolling back to an older revision will solve the problem

MrDelish

those aren't artifacts, since the program throws errors if the card is artifacting

what else could they be, though? o_O

Gently Benevolent

Houndx wrote: »

Double posting, but I feel like I should stress that if you've never dismantled a laptop that you should hesitate to start now unless you're prepared for it to stop functioning altogether.

It's fine, I've taken this laptop to bits before (and before you ask, the first time I did was AFTER this problem started happening )

The thermal paste/heatsink cleaning thing sounds like my best bet, so I'll definitely be doing that.

Mugsley

I'll have to dig up specs on your laptop, but it's certainly not a bad idea to see if you can jam some more RAM in there while you've got things cracked open. It won't help your temp issues but it may help things run a little smoother.


The reports are mostly undocumented, but you may find some very moderate temperature help by moving to Win 7.


Edit: +1 on NotebookReview.com forums. They are a great community for platform-specific help.

FyreWulff

That's a GPU that is overheating/starting to get warped. Happened to my 360 as well, it didn't throw an error until it got really bad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56JsPQwcPBk

A re-seating and new layer of thermal paste might fix it, but for now you should probably stay away from intensive games.