Is this a driver issue or is my graphics card dying?

Shmael1053 · July 13, 2022

I semi-recently acquired this 3060 Ti from Gigabyte, and recently I've started to notice some worrying behavior.

For the past week or so, if I'm in a game or watching a YouTube video, or anything else that utilizes the GPU, every so often the screen will black out for a second before coming back. Not world-ending, but deeply frustrating when you're playing a game.

Right before going to make this post, though, I started getting visual artifacts when doing run-of-the-mill stuff. I opened Firefox to do something else and the screen had those messed up areas seen in the attached photos. Some of the characters in this very post were a little wonky in the text box until I moused over the area and they seemingly refreshed - I've actually had that happen in Microsoft Word for a while now, but it was such a minor issue that I didn't think much of it.
This all started within the past few days, right around the time Windows 10 installed a new update and Nvidia installed a new "Game Ready Driver". I don't want to RMA my GPU if this is a software issue, so I figured I would post here first for a second opinion. Is this a software problem or is my graphics card dying after ~3 months of use?

zzlttzz · July 14, 2022

It seems like VRAM related problem,or overclock too high, ddu the driver on safe mode and hope it will back to normal.

If it's still doing this try it on another PC before RMA your card.

Shmael1053 · July 14, 2022

4 hours ago, zzlttzz said:

It seems like VRAM related problem,or overclock too high, ddu the driver on safe mode and hope it will back to normal.

If it's still doing this try it on another PC before RMA your card.

Yeah, that card is overclocked so I'll give that a shot tomorrow. I have a backup GPU I swapped in an hour ago and that's working flawlessly so it doesn't seem to be a Windows or Nvidia issue. Will put the Gigabyte card back in tomorrow and try to mess with the OC settings/drivers to troubleshoot.