graphics bugs with ATI 4800 series (4850/4870/4890)

[telejunky]

Interesting that it is not heat related but how about your vram while cooling the gpu with water... maybe they are too hot?

[Phnx]

I have an HD3850. I have the exact same problem and my temps are ok. I checked them. It seems this problem is vram related.

[Mike@Uk]

I've also been having this problem with an ATI 3870, it seems to happen more when I'm in built up city areas like Chernogorsk and Elektrozavodsk or other areas where alot of objects are loaded / loading quickly (like when I'm flying a jet).

Card temperatures are between 60 - 70c while in game (Although afew days ago I noticed my fan only ran at 20% speed and was getting to 80 - 90c!, however I have it set at 45% speed now so the temperature is more stable, however the artefacts still show up.)

Here's an example:

http://img188.imageshack.us/img188/2...aphicstear.jpg

[Goeth]

Yup me too, had the artefacts few times. First i thought it was the big cities that caused it but then it happened on the countryside too. Card temps were ok, it think it was alt+tab that caused the problem.

[Ginger McAle]

You might have other parts of GPU over-heating too (VRAM for example) and there is no sensors for it.

Interesting that it is not heat related but how about your vram while cooling the gpu with water... maybe they are too hot?

At the 4850 there are sensors for the memory.

i had something like that with ARMA1 before, with AGP ATI card. I solved it at CMOS settings, cant remember where, but it's something like video memory (or somthing) and set it to maximum of the card memory. default was set at 64mb. my card was 512mb by I can only set it to 256mb and that solve the problem. Last time i think the term of this bug is called "graphic artifacts"...

I think you mean the AGP Aperture size, its only at AGP graphic cards. Today most cards are PCI Express, this setting is not there anymore.



I did again research for a few hours, its definetly not a heat problem. As you can see in my video, the graphic error/bug can be triggered by looking in different directions.

And i can also confirm that this grapic bug/error is also there at country side, not only in big cities. When lowering almost all graphic settings to minimum it seems the bug does not occur. But this is more a workaround till Bohemia finds a solution for it.


Here are my temps (watercooled), ingame at a minute later in windows when the temperatures are cooled down:




As you can see, the temperature differences are very small when the card is water cooled. When cooling the card with the stock cooler, the temperatures are somewhere between 70-90 ° Celsius (this sounds high, but is a normal heat). As we can see now the ATI 38xx product line is also affected.

Yesterday i had also made a test and set all the fans that do cool down the water to 100% and pointed an additional fan on the graphics card and set it to 100% also. The graphic error/bug did occur, made no difference, only the temperatures were cooler.

Again,

1. its most propably NOT a heat problem
2. different graphic driver versions seems not to make any difference
3. in ArmA 1 this do also happen, but less often
4. the card is not overclocked
5. problem is reproducable
6. problem does not occur in other games i played

I know, when you overclock your card, you have exact the same graphic glitches/errors/symptoms (big full screen fast moving triangles) but this problem does occur on NOT overclocked cards.

I hope Bohemia will see this thread and will help us ATI users.

Regards
Ginger aka Mariusz

[ohara]

It looks that your GC have problems to load texture, try to set videomemory on normal or low. Check how is in your bios set speed of bus for your GC.

[Ginger McAle]

Thanks for looking into this thread.

problem occur: normal video memory & textures
problem did not occur yet: low video memory & textures

Iam not the only one, 4 people (including me) till now saw this thread and had this problem, different graphic cards, but all from ATI, 3xxx and 4xxx series.

[ohara]

I expect that its some problem of combination of your motherboard (chipset) and ATI driver (fragmentation of videomemory, texture load). Just for test, try to run game with
-window argument, maybe in that case will be videomemory handled different way.

[Ginger McAle]

My GC PCIE bus is at default value, not overclocked, 100

Motherboard is MSI P35 Neo2 FIR: North Bridge -> Intel Bearlake P35


Started ArmA2 windowed, problem did occur again, i went into the editor, set all settings to high, placed me into a helicopter over a city to get the error quickly and it did come very fast.

[ohara]

Sreen shows that you have also corrupted 3D data in videomemory, uff dont know how to help you for now. Try -noCB argument just for test, game will be slower, but maybe it help, if not, we will need to wait for some repro to know more whats source of problems.