Weird dots and lines that look like dead pixels

tugga

This happens in browsers only, FireFox more than Chrome, but it happens in both. I get these green dots that appear and disappear randomly. If its on a pure white background they are pink.

Sometimes when I scroll they disappear, sometimes they make these lines when i scroll. There seems to be no real pattern for this, except that it happens in browsers. Quite a bit on this site, imgur, and news sites. Sometimes facebook.





Since I was able to take a screenshot, I feel like its not a monitor issue. And since it only happens in browsers and not games, its not purely a video driver issue. I think.

Specs:

GPU: Radeon HD 6850 1gb
GPU Driver: Catalyst 13.2 beta (13.1 does the same thing)
Flash Version: 11.6.602.171

I ran the plugin check and only plugins that were out of date were Quicktime, Adobe Reader, and Shockwave for Director.

I was worried it was an issue with the video card itself, but my game performance hasnt been affected and i run some higher end games like BF3 with the settings on max.

I'm fresh out of ideas, and google returned 3 results. Or i'm really bad at google.

Foomy

Looks like a dying gpu to me, could be something died in the 2d accelerator, or in a memory section that isn't used in games.

But I would guess your gpu is toast, seeing as it happens in a screenshot, and you've tried older drivers.

Could maybe be your cable from the gpu to the monitor, try switching it out if you have a spare.

tugga

I'm really worried about a dying gpu as this machine doesn't have onboard graphics

I don't have a problem rma'ing the card I just would be sans computer until I got a new card

I'll see what amd tells me. You guys are just faster than them at responding

Foomy

Well you can hope.

But 90% of the time when weird artifacts appear on screen, something has broken in the gpu.

Essee

I mean I've had somewhat similar artifacts occasionally (only in Windows, not in games), but never on a regular basis like you're having them. And the artifacts I'm thinking of are parts of webpages, etc., that go away or get worse when you scroll. They aren't green or pink; when I see there are artifacts of those specific colors on the screen I immediately think "dying video card." The ones you're dealing with are not related to the webpages you're on (except that they happen to display different colors on different backgrounds). Since you screenshotted it it's unlikely to be your monitor, yep (but otherwise dying monitors can totally do this stuff too-- usually in cyan/magenta/yellow though).

supabeast

+1 to dying GPU, or worse, some other important mainboard chip that will cause instability as it dies. What you need to do ASAP is back up everything important in case it isn’t the GPU and the problem causes file corruption.

An RMA shouldn’t leave you with no PC. Usually the vendor sends the card immediately and you send back the dead one.

tugga

supabeast wrote: »

+1 to dying GPU, or worse, some other important mainboard chip that will cause instability as it dies. What you need to do ASAP is back up everything important in case it isn’t the GPU and the problem causes file corruption.

An RMA shouldn’t leave you with no PC. Usually the vendor sends the card immediately and you send back the dead one.

XFX has a lifetime warranty, which is understandably strict so they want the card first so they can see that i didn't modify the card in any way. Next week is spring break, so i think i'll get the ticket opened in the next two days so during the break when i dont need the PC for school, it wont hurt to be without one

Decomposey

One more for GPU. I had a similar issue, though it was smearing horizontally on web pages and such, not vertical artifacts. However games didn't seem affected at all, only text it seemed. Until one day, games suddenly WERE, the card crashing and rendering everything in checkerboards and 16 bit. Then squealing loudly, rolling over, and dying.

Hevach

GPU, yeah. Or possibly video memory, which in 99.99+% of cases is functionally the same, gotta replace the card.

Great Scott

This looks like bad video memory to me. I've had a number of video cards that showed this exact problem, and it wasn't always a GPU fault. I'm especially suspicious that it's the local RAM because you can run games on full settings without crashing.

I'd try underclocking the GPU, testing that, and then underclocking the graphics memory if that doesn't help. The Catalyst Control Center -> Performance -> AMD Overdrive is where you'll find this, although you'd need to enable that feature first.