extreme texture issues (pics included)

whats your take, to me it is a sign of overheating, but how? I have an ATI 9800 Pro 128mb with a 2.4 ghz P4, I run Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 at max resolution and textures just fine not one artifact, GW while pretty is no where near as intensive on the Graphics. Any thoughts?

I would point at the GPU or CPU but my fans are working fine and this has started to happen after the last update or 2. When i got it in the begining I would play for HOURS!!!! and nothing. It has to lay in a patch, has to.

****What Happens****

I start playing just fine, I can go for about 10-20 maybe 30 minutes, it varies all the time, then an artifact comes up, then another than another, I hit the windows key and click back in, it is all fine, they it starts up again.
When i windows out i see red yellow and green lines that stay on my desktop.

No i did not OC.

starts out like this, small but annoying...


then gets severe...

I'd point to the game installation itsself or a background process that is running. Have you checked the main Guild Wars website? Your graphics card might be the one that has problems running the game. Other than that, I can't think of anything else.

Looks like artifacting. This happens when your card overheats.

I thought overheating too, but Doom 3 FarCry and HL2 should be what overheats the card, not Guild Wars, the requirements are like half of the other games.

I have a ATI 9800 Pro 128mb.......FYI!!!

I read on the site that it is nvidia with the issues, not ATI, but I did see it could be the 9800 series as well somewhere ese.

I used to OC my card but backed it down to default speeds a while ago since i did not need to OC. It played fine, so I thought overheating to, I then thought, maybe my fan is broke? but it is swirling around fine. I am at a loss. Plus it played fine till the last update or two. this is a newer issue.

I did get severe texture issues for UT2004 but Epic had me clear something out (i forgot what) and BAM worked fine from then on.

I e-mailed supprot so, ill keep updates coming here.

I have a 2.8ghz w/9800 pro 128meg. I keep the PCI slot next to it open and the cover off of the slot off. It really helps keep it running cool.

I decided to try and reseat the card! So far it looks like this worked as well as to what else i did.

I saw a build up of dust in the sinks on one side, so i determined this was the side air was being pulled in. I blew out that side with compressed air and ut the card in, so far I played for 40 minutes with no issues at all, It was overheating but i think it was not getting enough air through the sinks.

What driver version are you running?, if your running the new catalyst's then that could be the problem

Dirkiess has said that the newer catalyst's are optimised for the x8** series of cards, meaning that the drivers could be looking for certain hardware features your card doesn't have, so if you have installed then try rolling back to maybe the 4.11's I know they worked well for me when I had a 9800xt


EDIT- glad you've sorted it, your last post was obscured by a brown line, so I couldn't read it

Just btw [even though you maybe fixed your problem], i've had a similar problem with my Nvidia, i looked high and low and peopel suggested different drivers and checking on heat. I had almost identical artifacts appearing in all my games including GW [and it also only appeared after awhile]. The thing that did fix it was:

Turn ON Anti-Aliasing [best place for me was in your driver's window settings, not in the game itself, even though GW actually have that setting too]. Generally the higher the Anti-Aliasing [as in 4x,8x etc] the fewer of these artifacts appeared. In general if i saw little green and pink dots appear in the sky and on the landscape, i step up my anti-aliasing ....this seemed to fix it with a penalty to performance.

Also it seems resolution also plays a role combined with the AA'ing. [I had this in games like Riddick , where my graphics would corrupt completely on certain resolutions, but pushing up the AA to the max would fix it but then my FPS dropped like crazy :P]

but they seperate the driver families on ati.com by the names like Rage, Radeon, Etc. I am sure the newer drivers are optimized for the sweet x9** series but the 9800 is still sold and not that old, actually come to find out they are still expensive 250.00 and the x800 Pro is 300.00, anyone should just splurge and get the x800, it is 4 times the pipes and more advanced GPU with MUCH bigger fan for better cooling. *dreams*

You gave me the heads up on the so I can look into it now, thanks!

To be honest, I've found Guild Wars more taxing than Doom 3, Far Cry, and Half Life 2, and I use a 6600GT.

I'm no expert with ATI drivers, so I'll leave this in the capable hands of the crew here.

i hear the 6600GT is the best perfromer in its price range. how many pipelines does it have? what kind of FPS do you get on Doom3 or HL2?

Hey Akilles,

With regards to the ATI Drivers, the Rage, Radeon etc are just the range of cards that ATI made at that time. Within those ranges, there were different models along the line that had features as they progressed that older cards didn't have. Newer driver versions were released to use those new features, but backwards compatible with the older cards. In the case of the Radeon series, we are looking at 9600, 9800, X800 and X850etc. The X800 series of cards are more advanced and have a lot more features available to them than the 9xxx series and the Cat 5 drivers are more optimal to those cards.

The 9xxx series cards work best with the Cat 4.11 drivers or the Cat 4 series of drivers. I have found no real advantage using the newer Cat 5 series, and if anything, I have noticed a slow down with these drivers over the Cat 5 drivers, with the odd hiccup along the way.

WHether they are still selling 9xxx series cards or not, just means they are trying to get rid of old stock as much as possible and has nothing to do with drivers.

ATI make the Cat 5 drivers compatible with the ATI 9xxx series and there may be the odd game and bug fix, but no overall improvement in speeds or usability of the card.

Using Cat 4.11 is your safest bet to test out your system, whether Doom or Half Life 2 are running or not. As most people have noticed, for some reason, GW is a very Intensive game and uses the cards a lot more than these other games do. Why this is, is anyones guess as I would say there is as much going on in Doom 3 and Half Life 2 as there is in Guild Wars.

What is quite possible with Guild Wars, is that there is something in the coding that is causing problems with older cards and newer drivers. Maybe it's possible that Guild Wars is looking for a feature in those drivers that isn't available in your card and causing the GPU to fail over time.

It's my own opinion as there are lots of people out there playing Guild Wars fine with various combinations.

The only other options, are to try various drivers releases for different hardware on your machine, and make sure you have the most stable releases that are available. Trust me, I used to have one series of Mobo, and what a pain in the arse that was, to get anything stable on it. Eventually one release of VIA drivers was released and that solved all problems. Even attempt an install of newer drivers and problems would resurface.

I would also get all your hardware settings checked over and make sure you have things set correctly in your BIOS. Even a change of the AGP size could make a big difference as some people have found.
If you have 128mb card, set your agp aperture size to 256 or 512. Why would you do this? As far as I understand, increasing this size helps the overall performance of graphics throughput in your system.
I must test that out.

Anyway, I know it was a lot to read, but I hope some of this helps you solve your problem.

P.S. Remember to use Driver Cleaner from www.guru3d.com inbetween driver uninstall and reinstall.

athlon 2800 and radeon 9600 no problems (graphicly) other issues insue..