Non overclocking-related artifacts

[LooneyJuice]

Hello Dudes/Dudettes

 

First off, GPU is a G1 Gaming 970 on 365.19.

 

I want to ask if anyone's encountered this. Very rarely, even when I'm browsing on chrome, or steam, I get these weird momentary elongated red flashes/lines for a split second on one side of the screen, and they're extremely rare. Sometimes it happens when a video is playing, sometimes when I'm scrolling, almost completely randomly, very rarely, and it's for an instant. I cannot for the life of me find any kind of documentation online other than connector issues (which I've checked thoroughly and reconnected last night, and the pages I found were related to rolling red lines everywhere, which I don't have), which is the reason I'm asking. The card's a couple of months old, and aside from a 2/3 day period during which I was testing OC profiles for absolute stability, I've been running stock for the most part, so it hasn't been tortured or anything, stock bios, no silly overvoltage.

 

I've done long sessions of stuff like Metro Last light, Doom, The Division and such, uncapped framerate for testing and extra stress, nothing, no artifacting on Heaven, Valley or Firestrike, nothing. The only instances during which I've seen those tiny red flashing lines are during desktop loads and Assetto Corsa (fairly intensive driving game, but not say like The Witcher 3 or something like that). Again connectors are checked, stock clocks.

 

The only couple of reasons I can think of,  either likely or unlikely are as follows:

 

1. Dropped frame/momentary stutter without Vsync maybe exposed a bit of a previous frame (Sort of grasping at straws, but the only 3D application i've seen it in is Assetto Corsa)

2. Failing power strip, inconsistent power delivery (although PSU appears fine, voltage droop is minimal under load, even for an old TT PSU)

3. Interference due to some electrical appliance/switch nearby switching on/drawing more power

4. Last but not least (and I sure as f*ck hope that's not the case) very slowly dying VRAM

 

I'm mainly asking if anyone's encountered this and if so, possibly what proved to be the case. I can find nothing else pertaining to this issue.

 

Many thanks to anyone chiming in.

[Carclis]

There should probably be a sticky for this but anyone having problems on an Nvidia card should probably resort to older drivers such as 362 as they've been quite bad lately. There is a good chance that is not the issue but it at least eliminates the possibility. Just make sure to use DDU in removing the old drivers. It sounds more likely though that you might just have a bad card.

 

Does the issue still persist if you underclock the card by a small amount?

[don_svetlio]

Use 361.75 - newer drivers are terrible

[LooneyJuice]

11 hours ago, Carclis said:

There should probably be a sticky for this but anyone having problems on an Nvidia card should probably resort to older drivers such as 362 as they've been quite bad lately. There is a good chance that is not the issue but it at least eliminates the possibility. Just make sure to use DDU in removing the old drivers. It sounds more likely though that you might just have a bad card.

 

Does the issue still persist if you underclock the card by a small amount?

I haven't underclocked the card manually, but I have noticed it once or twice in Assetto Corsa again when the usage was low enough while racing for GPU boost to throttle down a bit. So I saw it even at say 1178mhz (this card's base clock) and not just 1392 (this card's actual boost clock). Again I have gone on long runs of benchmarks/games with no effect whatsoever, and suddenly i'll see this one red little line on the corner of my screen. One thing I'm investigating though is the chance that I'm getting the little artifact as a result of a momentary hitch when the MSI AB (RTSS) OSD is being fired up while detecting the application.

[Carclis]

9 hours ago, LooneyJuice said:

I haven't underclocked the card manually, but I have noticed it once or twice in Assetto Corsa again when the usage was low enough while racing for GPU boost to throttle down a bit. So I saw it even at say 1178mhz (this card's base clock) and not just 1392 (this card's actual boost clock). Again I have gone on long runs of benchmarks/games with no effect whatsoever, and suddenly i'll see this one red little line on the corner of my screen. One thing I'm investigating though is the chance that I'm getting the little artifact as a result of a momentary hitch when the MSI AB (RTSS) OSD is being fired up while detecting the application.

It could very well be that. I myself haven't had much luck with any applications which use an OSD. For me the usually result in crashes.

[LooneyJuice]

11 minutes ago, Carclis said:

 

Yeah makes sense, and it really depends on a lot of things like hardware config, drivers, other software running in the background. Additionally, yesterday I switched application detection completely off, haven't seen it once. Could be that, could be random. Out of just sheer aching curiosity I just ran a session on The Division with my safe overclock, which is still more than a lot of samples (1525mhz core/8000mhz memory) just to stress it a little more and see whether it would trigger anything. Nada, zip, nothing. So this could be a bit of a false alarm. I just hope that if it shits itself, it does it under warranty.

 

Thanks a lot for the input though, much appreciated!