texture corruption: video card on the blink?

[VJ]

Hello,

Just yesterday, I encountered some odd texture corruption in (old) games on my Parhelia. Some textures appeared to flash green, red or a mix of both. This happened both in Server 2008 and in Vista Ultimate - on the same game.

I'm using the latest drivers, but I haven't played this game before on either OS (last time round, I used XP).
Could it be OS related, or video card related?

Is there a way of testing the video memory?

Thanks!


Jörg

[Marshmallowman]

Does it happen on other games etc?, if not I would attribute it to matrox's lackluster dx/opengl driver support.

You could try backing off the acceleration in the display drivers troubleshooting tab, maybe try disabling writecombing?.

I think you can sometimes get stuff like that with agp issues, eg check your agp option in the bios, maybe back off agp speed as a test.

[VJ]

I haven't tried any other games yet...
This particular games has worked without issues on XP, so I would think the dx/opengl support is sufficiant for it.

Come to think of it, there has been a hardware change since the last time I played: a PCI-X (64-bit, 100 MHz) raidcontroller has been added to the system.
The bios doesn't offer that much options, but I'll start tinkering with it.
I'll also install XP, to see if it still occurs there as well...


Jörg

[Evildead666]

How old is Old ?
Are we talking Win95 games or Pre-Win95..?

[VJ]

XP era, pre-Vista
(3 or so years old)

Jörg

[Evildead666]

Then its probably the card unfortunately...

If you can control the clocks, I had some trouble with bad memory on one of my 6800GT's, and just downclocked to below stock, and no artefacting/tearing...

It could at least confirm the deadness of some of the memory...

[VJ]

I ran this stress test:

http://mikelab.kiev.ua/index_en.php?page=PROGRAMS/vmt_en

And it yields no errors...

In the game, it seems to depend on the detail settings. On the lowest setting, there is no issue; on the highest it occurs (settings changes filtering, textures, shaders, ...). I'll check furthere details. And I also noticed there is an update out for it.


Jörg

[rylan]

My guess would be either the GPU itself or drivers.
Since it depends on the detail setting, it is most likely the awesome Matrox drivers.

[Mikko]

Could be the lack of support for pixel shaders / vertex shaders.