AMD card giving me trouble in games.

[Radec]

Just bought StarCraft II, thought I'd finally give it a go.
After installing, the game recommends to put everything on Ultra.
But after going through the settings, I put most on medium to low.

But having massive problems. Game sometimes cuts out, and comes back, often changing resolution of main window bar. The whole screen might start spamming giant green blocky pixels which is very weird. And the card heats to around 81degrees when watching any cut scenes, which look quite awful.

Tried changing around to windowed mode, full, faffing about with all the setting, and V-sync is off. But just seems to be off.

Am using windows 7 64b.
AMD Radeon HD7870 x-edition.

I'm thinking it might be the card. But it can handle games such as Arma III on ultra at 1080 just fine.
All drivers up tp date ect, as far as I can tell.

Anyone know what might be wrong?
Thanks

 

[kaku]

Is it artefacting all the time while SC2 is running?
I remember when SC2 was first released it didn't have an FPS limit in the menus, so cards would essentially be under 100% all the time. I don't know if they ever fixed it, but if not it could be that putting extra stress on your card.

Artefacts do point to an unstable overclock or faulty VRAM though. Does it happen in any other games/benchmarks?

 

[Radec]

not all the time.
Everything other game is fine, and you can hear the games running with a slight buzz from the card.

Is SC however, during a game, the buzz from the card will stop, and the resume, and the display will flicker or freeze. and often just crash.

 

[BluD]

The buzz from the card is proberbly just a slight coil whine which will cut out when the game crashes cause it drop the load back off the card.

 

[BluD]

I would install GPU-z so you can monitor what the card is doing, so you get a better idea of whats going on when its crashing.

 

[Radec]

i'll have a look

 

[Radec]

Had another game, and cut out again.
Had a seperate window open to check the card:
http://i.imgur.com/CKxYTLY.jpg

The little break in the graph is when the game stopped briefly.
Really confused because no other game will do this.

 

[Vince]

looks like the card is dropping down to it's idle (2d clocks) and voltage.

It looks like this is documented on other hardware as well.

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/628260756

I would use afterburner to force the card to run on it's 3d clocks then play a game and see what happens. You can (i think) also force this by disabling "powerplay" also called ULPS in afterburner.

 

[Radec]

Thanks for suggestion.
Will try this tomorrow. If I mess about with this anymore, it's just going to end up giving me headache

 

[Mei]

is raptr loaded?
its having trouble with a couple blizzard games & the overlay turned on
i have to turn off the overlay if i want to play hots
just thought id ask >.<

 

[Radec]

Yea it loads and records everything, never got around to turning the damn thing off...
Will try this tomorrow too, thank you!

 

[Radec]

Tried turning off raptr, and then setting SC II priority to high.
And afterburner, disabling ULPS.
And jumping into a game.

The card still stopped for a second, but noticed windows alert me to "AMD driver stopped responding, but has successfully recovered".

Could this issue be because of the driver with this specific game?
I'm going to uninstall and reinstall drivers.

 

[Radec]

Just a thought: This is the only game that I installed to my SSD rather than HDD.
Could a problem be there at all?

 

[40Four]

Seems like it is just an issue with that game and the particular driver you are using. What driver version are you using? The newest AMD driver is 15.5 on the website. You could try the 14.12 non beta or search google to find even older ones.

Can't see why your SSD would be the problem unless it is just faulty. There should be a drive testing tool on the manufacturers website, you could give it a try to eliminate the drive as a suspect.