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Sapphire 6870 Jerky and Artifacting?

Associate
Joined
23 May 2008
Posts
393
Location
Essex
I've had my 6870 for a couple of weeks now and I'm getting increasingly worried that it's faulty. No game seems to be silky smooth despite the frame rates showing that it should be, even games which were completely smooth on my 8800GTX aren't on this card. I'm also experiencing FPS drops in everything, even Worms Reloaded (when switching goes it sometimes drops to about 35 then goes back up to 60 again). I'm also experiencing very minor artifacting on some games. Most notably Dead Rising 2 where I'm getting icons flashing and white blotches flashing up around dialog boxes. Amongst other things, I've noticed pretty awful aliasing on most games. GTA4 is definitely the worst. The game looks considerably worse than it did on my 8800GTX. Another GTA4 problem I've noticed is at night time, cars lights and street lamps flash. I 'should' also be able to max the settings on GTA4 easily but when I do, despite the frame rate being around 35-50, it appears extremely jerky. No idea what's going on with this card. I've reinstalled drivers countless times, the temperatures never really go above 70 and the jerky appearance (on mostly every game) is always accompanied by the sort of frame rates I'd expect from this card.

Help!
 
How did you remove your old drivers?

Was about say that as well.If you had an nvidia card installed beforehand and you hadn't got rid of all the remnants of the detonators, they can and will interfere with the catalyst drivers and give some horrible results.
I'd suggest going into safe mode, running driver cleaner to get rid of the nvidia drivers, reboot into normal mode, reinstal the ati drivers and reboot, (thats if you haven't already done it that way previously. If not give it a go and post back with the results
 
I've removed the drivers in every way possible and I have seemingly tried out every single version of 10.10 on the internet, as well as the version on my CD which came with the card. I just removed everything using Driver Cleaner Pro and Driver Sweeper and exactly the same problem. I'm pretty confident there's no Nvidia drivers knocking about still so common sense tells me the card probably has some faulty memory on it. This is really getting me down as I hate returning stuff :(

In answer to Skyrocket. Yes, I use Vsync, yes, GTA4 has no AA, but with exactly the same settings, the 6870 looks far worse than my 8800GTX did? I'm using the standard settings in CCC. I did try using the custom AA settings in CCC with GTA but it just made the stuttering absolutely unbearable (despite the frames still being above 30?). I'm checking the FPS with either Xfire or Fraps. They both show the same results.

Dead Rising 2 is the only game I've 'noticed' the artifacts on however, but every game is a little bit stuttery, far from the butter smooth experience I crave! I think I said before, but in DR2 the artifacting manifests itself in and around the dialog boxes and icons. It's like white blotches flashing up for a split second and flashing lights that aren't supposed to be flashing.
 
If you can hang on till monday, my sapphire 6870 arrives then and I can check that out and do some comparions for you, got a similar system to you as well. If you can, run a coupla crysis benchies and post the results here and I'll do the same.
 
You could resize one of your drives and do a fresh (small) os install into the free space just for testing - that should help identify if its existing junk on your system causing the problems.

Also have you used gpuz to check that your card is running in pci-e x16 mode and isn't stuck at x1 mode or anything silly?
 
Thanks Pieman, I'll do that. Can I download the Crysis benchie for free or is it included in the demo? I don't have the game itself.

I do have a spare 50gb partition so I could install a copy of 7 on there in theory. My only worry about that is, will it automatically make itself a dual boot and give me the choice between the 2 versions of 7, or do I have to do something in particular?

My PSU is a Corsair TX650.

g5e.png
 
If your using vsync on then it will drop from 60 to 30 fps on a consistant bases UNLESS your using triplebuffering.If your not using triplebuffering any time the card drops even 1 frame below 60 fps it will automatically go to 30 fps no matter what.I`m assuming with your 8800gtx you must have had some overide on which gave you triplebuffering.

Download D3D overrider and use that to give you triplebuffering enabled in most games (some games appear not to work with it sometimes but ive often found if you alt+return out and back in again the tripplebuffering activates).Also the triplebuffering option you see in the ATI driver is for OPENGL games only (although im not sure if it`s been updated to include DX,i stand to be corrected there).

On the subject of GTA4,the only setting that works with the ati is the new MORPHOLOGICAL AA.This can look a little odd,espacially with text.Non of the other settings in ccc will have any effect on GTA4.Just make sure that ANY other game you use MLAA in you have the anti-aliasing settting put on USE APPLICATION SETTINGS and then you deactivate the in game AA.Otherwise you`ll be applying the AA effect to the morph AA and bring your game to a grinding halt.

Yours

Dash
 
Two things, try the card on a fresh install of windows, and also try the card with just the display driver, incase its a setting you'v activated in ccc that is causing the card to lagg in games..
 
I've removed the drivers in every way possible and I have seemingly tried out every single version of 10.10 on the internet, as well as the version on my CD which came with the card. I just removed everything using Driver Cleaner Pro and Driver Sweeper and exactly the same problem. I'm pretty confident there's no Nvidia drivers knocking about still so common sense tells me the card probably has some faulty memory on it. This is really getting me down as I hate returning stuff :(

What operating system are you using?
 
Windows 7 64 bit. I have triplebuffering turned on in CCC, but as you say, it may not work in all games. I'll try out that D3D Overrider when I can. Thanks.

I'll try a fresh install of windows soon as well.
 
Windows 7 64 bit. I have triplebuffering turned on in CCC, but as you say, it may not work in all games. I'll try out that D3D Overrider when I can. Thanks.

I'll try a fresh install of windows soon as well.

I`ve just checked and i was right the triplebuffering setting in CCC is opengl only.So basically gta4 and pretty anything you`ve been playing is more than likely direct x and thus your not getting any triplebuffering hence your wild swings in frame rate.Try a quick check with vsync off and see if your frame rates dip into the 40 and 50 but holds at them figures.Chances are you`ll see a more stable frame rate(tearing will be present but just see how it goes first).
 
Windows 7 64 bit.

Sorry I know its late and you will probably won't read this but this explains why you are having so many problems. Driver Cleaner + Windows 7 = :eek: When running Driver Cleaner it seems that it deletes crucial windows video driver files this has happened to countless people who upgraded to the 5000 series and didn't realise you were better of keeping he Nvidia drivers in place rather then trying to remove them completely as W7 has a kernel made from running two independent sets of display driver.

A reinstall is your best option in this case I'm afraid. If you RMA'd this back to OCUK I bet you £50 they will just say it works fine in there test rig and on the games they played.
 
Sorry I know its late and you will probably won't read this but this explains why you are having so many problems. Driver Cleaner + Windows 7 = :eek: When running Driver Cleaner it seems that it deletes crucial windows video driver files this has happened to countless people who upgraded to the 5000 series and didn't realise you were better of keeping he Nvidia drivers in place rather then trying to remove them completely as W7 has a kernel made from running two independent sets of display driver.

A reinstall is your best option in this case I'm afraid. If you RMA'd this back to OCUK I bet you £50 they will just say it works fine in there test rig and on the games they played.

Thanks for the reply. I did however have the problems before I used Driver Sweeper. I only used it as an attempted solution to the problem. I haven't RMA'd the card yet and I'm still not sure whether I should or not. The problems are far too hard to diagnose and I know that they'll just send it back with no fault found. I'll try installing 7 again on my 2nd partition along with the problem games to see if it fixes the issues.

In regard to the triple buffering. I did try GTA4 without Vsync but the tearing was so awful I turned it straight back off again. What annoys me the most about GTA4 wasn't the unstable framerates as GTA4 is never completely smooth, but the terrible aliasing :( I can't work out why the ATI card looked worse on exactly the same settings. I'll try it again without Vsync again tonight.

This is my first ATI card and I'm starting to regret it now :p Not the best introduction to the ATI world.
 
If you don't want to reinstall your main rig just to test the card, if you have a spare HDD you can just do a clean install on that, pop in the drivers and some benchmarks and see how you go. Should only need 40 or 80GB or so.
 
I'm in a really odd situation here. I'm tempted to cut my losses and sell the card on in favour of a GTX 470 (my original plan) as I'm far from impressed with ATI in general. Pretty awful drivers, a fair bit of trouble to get some games working properly, but it wouldn't feel quite right selling a potentially faulty card. The reason my situation is odd is that I think my card is 'slightly' faulty, but not faulty enough to return. I'll install a fresh copy of windows tonight, preferably on a completely different drive and see if it fixes the issues, if not, what the hell should I do?
 
Firstly GTA4 is one of the worst console ports in the history of the universe! you will not get an acurate measure of graphics performance with it period.

Secondly, to spend two days procrastinating on a forum when it takes one hour at most to check a fresh install on an old hd/clean partition is beyond me. It sounds like some old driver remnents is messing about, it could be the nvidia drivers with the added physx and cuda bloat that might still be hiding there. Best way to disprove that theory would be, guess what, a fresh install.

If you have the same issues, with frankly any other game than GTA4 - and hopefully something other than a console port, after a fresh install - then you'll need to start looking at hardware.
 
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