What Causes Graphics Card Artifacts
Malka Sedano
This article was written by Luigi Oppido and by wikiHow staff writer, Travis Boylls. Luigi Oppido is the Owner and Operator of Pleasure Point Computers in Santa Cruz, California. Luigi has over 25 years of experience in general computer repair, data recovery, virus removal, and upgrades. He is also the host of the Computer Man Show! broadcasted on KSQD covering central California for over two years.
This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources.
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If you're seeing distortions, pixilation, odd textures, random colors, or other anomalies on your computer screen, it may be due to GPU artifacting. Luckily, there are some things you can do to fix it. This wikiHow article teaches you what GPU artifacting is, what causes it, and how to fix it.
GPU artifacting is when you see visual anomalies caused by your GPU, such as distortions, flashes, lines, and pixelation. Artifacting is often caused by overheating, software issues, or extreme graphics settings. It could also indicate that your GPU is running too hot or not working properly.
So I recently built my first gaming PC just over a month ago after some extensive research online. Everything has been running smoothly and looking great over the past month, and I have spent well over 100 hours gaming on it. All of a sudden yesterday, I started experiencing flickering horizontal bars of vertical lines across different parts of the screen. This continued until the screen eventually went black and I had to shut down the computer by holding the power button. Now whenever I turn the PC back on I see this visual artifact even when I'm not doing anything - at the login screen, the desktop, and while playing games. Sometimes it goes away and I can be on for a few hours without seeing it, other times it'll come back right away or not disappear at all. I've tried uninstalling the drivers and installing the latest ones, to no avail.
When I take a screenshot of the artifacts and view it later (when there is no artifacts), everything looks normal. This leads me to believe that it is not a graphics card or driver issue, but rather something to do with the monitor or connection. However, when I use AMD Cleanup to remove all drivers, without installing any display drivers afterwards, the visual artifacting is gone.
I really have no idea what could be causing this problem or what to do about it. All of the components in my PC are basically brand new and I have never overclocked anything. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Since you are seeing the Artifacts at Login it is possible you have a defective RX5700 or Monitor or cable. Try connecting your TV Set (another monitor) to the computer and see if you see the same Artifacts. If you do then that eliminates the Monitor.
Download either Furmark Fuzzy Donut or OCCT and stress test your GPU card with the AMD Driver installed. See what occurs or if your computer shuts down or freezes. Keep a close eye on Temperatures and Voltages while the Stress tests are running.
Thank you for the reply! I have been monitoring the temp of my GPU through the Radeon Performance overlay and it has not reached any worrisome temperatures. I also have not overclocked any of my components.
The problem is that the artifacts are mostly noticeable when the refresh rate of the monitor is set to 144 Hz, barely noticeable at 120 or 100 Hz, and not noticeable at all at 60 Hz. I don't have another 144 Hz monitor to test with, and every 60 Hz TV I have tried has shown no artifacts. So I don't think I can conclude anything based on that. I have also tried switching from DisplayPort to HDMI, as well as trying multiple HDMI cables and they have all shown the same artifacts at 144 Hz.
Your GPU card seems to be fine. Otherwise artifacts would have occurred at any Resolution frequencies. Most likely using a Stress test it would pass without any issues. But no harm just to see the results out of curiosity.
Once it finishes uninstalling the current AMD Driver in Safe mode and boots back to Windows Desktop, still with the Internet disconnected, delete the AMD Installation folder C:\AMD if it was created before.
Now install the full AMD Drive package you downloaded manually from AMD Download page. Not the express package. Run the package and if it installs correctly again delete C:\AMD folder and reconnect the internet.
I still haven't tried the stress test, but I just used AMD Cleanup Utility to remove all drivers and then downloaded an older version (20.4.1) which seems to have fixed the problem! Is that essentially the same as using DDU? Fingers crossed the artifacting doesn't return in which case I guess we can assume it was a bug with the newer driver or corrupted version?
No, I am using direct HDMI to HDMI and direct DisplayPort to DisplayPort. Also, just so I know, what would too high of a GPU temp? During high intensity gaming it reaches around 80 deg C at most. Is that ok? Also, what is the GPU junction temp? That is sometimes higher that the GPU temp for me.
At this point I'm starting to think it is probably my monitor that is causing this. When I take a screenshot of the artifacting it is not visible in the screenshot which means that it can't be the GPU right?
Do you have Freesync enabled or disabled? If enabled, disable it and see if the artifacts still occurs or not. Also make sure in Windows the Resolution and Hz are correct. Like 60 Hz instead of 59 hz as an example.
It turned out to be a defective monitor (Razer Raptor 27). After doing a bunch of testing and swapping it out with my friends monitor I was able to confirm that it wasn't a problem with the graphics card.
I have a Eurocom X3 laptop powered by i7 4800MQ, the GPU is nVidia 780GTX, if it matters somehow. For almost a year, the laptop was functioning fine in any tasks, including gaming. Then, all of a sudden, one day it began showing artifacts on the screen. Hasn't been overheated or dropped or anything, just snapped into this condition. Since the laptop was still on warranty, I requested RMA, which was fulfilled - the manufacturer reported the CPU was tested and failed, so they replaced it with an i7 4810MQ. The chip itself looked the same as the faulty i7 4800MQ (there was a slight scuff mark on the mirrored finish of both chips), but that did not concern me - when it was installed and the laptop was tested, there were no more artifacts. That was the middle of November last year.
The warranty is now over, though I've sent a request to Eurocom support - we'll see about their move. But for now, I believe it is essential to establish the reason for those artifacts, specifically what causes them to appear.
I've been doing quite a lot of testing today, including formatting the hard drive and clean installing Windows 7 x64, memory testing with Windows standard utility, and... found out, that the artifacts only appear when I install Intel HD Graphics driver (tried both 15.36.7.64.3960 and 15.36.14.64.4080 versions), specifically after the computer restarts at the end of the installation. When I uninstall the graphics driver, the artifacts disappear prior to the final step of the installer dialogue (asking if I am going to restart the PC now or later). The laptop is otherwise absolutely clean, except for the chipset driver (first tried the graphics drivers with Eurocom supplied version, being 9.4.0.1017, then updated with the latest 10.0.24 and tried everything once again).
One other thing, be it relevant or not - when in games, the artifacts generally appeared as black dots swarming the screen. However, there was one game, where the artifacts were not present at all - Surgeon Simulator 2013. Obviously I did not spend time gaming on a laptop with graphics failure - just figured I should try running games, since they would be delivering graphical content to the screen via dGPU. At least that's what I thought as a non tech savvy guy. Appears I was wrong and content is delivered to the screen with the help of iGPU drivers, apart from said case.
Google traslation from Italian : Hello everyone, I have the following problem I have a PC assembled with MOBO Gigabyte gaming intel 4690k with 5 and 6 GB of ram . Using as the video card intel HD 4600 integrated into the processor The monitor is a samsung tv connected to pc with HDMI / DVI Whenever I watch video content , regardless of the software that I use as a player I have a number of artifacts that I think are teatering screen . I tried to enable v-sync the video card in order to eliminate the problem to no avail . Do you have suggestions or directions ? THANK YOU
As promised, attached are the two graphics reports - "...olddrv.txt" was generated using manufacturer supplied drivers; "...newdrv.txt" was generated using Intel latest drivers downloaded from Intel website.
The fact that you are connecting an external monitor and the screen looks the same; it may indicate a hardware problem. I would say the graphics portion of the processor or the video port on the computer is defective.
Yeah, well, I did all that. In the initial post I've mentioned I did the experimenting on a clean Windows, meaning I had no drivers whatsoever. And I did try drivers from the links provided. Once I install Intel drivers, the artifacts appear, and whatever I do next, they remain until I uninstall the iGPU driver.
In the meantime I 've solved the problem A cause flashy artifacts was a set of windows 7. In fact I had disabled the Aero mode and set windows 7 classic or basic ( can not remember exactly ) Evidentemete it does not involve only a visual change of the windows but change the video drivers that are loaded and then the mode in which the video card . Probably do work the intel hd 4600 video card with WDDM XPDM instead resulted in the problem . However I have now re-enabled Windows Aero and everything came back OK
Glad it worked for you. I tried switching off Aero - the artifacts stay. In fact, I even tried switching to Windows 8.1 - the same, when I install the graphics driver, the artifacts appear. Apparently, mine is a hardware issue, not a software one. However it is unclear why I get it for the second time, with the second CPU...
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