Flickering textures and clipping

[titaniumx3]

This has been a problem with virtually every card I've ever bought. What I'm talking about is the annoying texture flickering and clipping at polygon seams observed in certain games. The best example is Battlefield 2, it totally ravages the game especially with my old 9800 pro and even with the X1900XT, though to a lesser extent. You mainly see it when zooming into distant objects (say with a sniper rifle), but also on certain closer objects; the grenades in BF2 are an excellent example, where the silver parts seem to be flickering/breaking up like crazy.

I've now also observed it in GR:AW, though nowhere near as bad as BF2 its still very annoying. Sometimes it appears on the chacters clothes, where the different polygons meet, sometimes its just the odd flickering texture here and there (luckily in GR:AW its not that noticeable). I also find that it mostly appears on distant buildings, statues, cars; you can clearly see the effect when using the sniper rifle scope.

Does anyone know the cause of this? Can it be fixed?

(BTW, I can remember with old games it used to appear when playing in 16bit colour, but I don't think games use 16bit these days.)

 

[titaniumx3]

Do you think its possibly related to overheating of the GPU/RAM?

 

[titaniumx3]

Thanks for all the replies! I took a screenshot in BF2, displaying the flickering when holding the grenade:

Its not the best example because its very difficult to capture the flickering in screenshots, but you can see the glitch (like missing parts of the texture) on the safety lever of the grenade (marked around in red); when playing, it is constantly changing shape and flickering at high speed. The effect can occasionally be seen on other weapons, but it seems to vary in intensity depending on how you are positioned, altitude and the paticular map you are playing; other times it just seems completely random!

I also captured a short video in GR:AW, displaying the problem. Its about 25mb, but please do check it out as its the best way to see the flickering:

Click here to watch GRAW-Flickering-graphics

As you can see, the flickering is mainly seen from a distance when zooming in with the sniper scope. The flickering in this video is actually pretty intense; most of the time its barely noticeable.

My main concern right now is if this is a symptom of an overheating GPU/RAM. Theres nothing pointing directly towards an overheating problem and there quite a few people reporting the same problem in BF2, but then again my card is hitting almost 90C under full load.

I'd really appreciate some if some GR:AW players could also post their findings; if its a common issue, then at least I can safely rule out overheating artifacts.

 

[titaniumx3]

I think its safe to say the BF2 flickering is a driver/software issue and I'm pretty sure when I first played the game it wasn't so bad; they may have changed something after the 1.12 patch.

That said, I've yet to find anyone reporting the same issue in GRAW.

 

[titaniumx3]

Quick update on this - I recently saw an all-time high of 95 degrees while playing Call of Juarez so I've taken out my second card. Load temp is now down to 55 degrees and all artefacting has stopped so it was definitely the GPUs getting too toasty.

So the flickering in BF2 has completely stopped?