Help with artifacts in Bad Company 2

E

Eriksrocks

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 14, 2010
Messages
397
First off, my system:
Antec 902
ASRock X58 Extreme
Intel Core i7-920 Bloomfield @ stock
ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro Rev.2
HIS Radeon HD 5850 1GB @ stock
A-DATA Gaming Series 4GB DDR3 1600G
WD Caviar Blue 640GB
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Since Bad Company 2 was released I've been experiencing some minor artifacts in the singleplayer and multiplayer portion of the game. There are little blocks that will flicker on the screen, usually white, gray, black, or a tinted shade of the ground color. They appear and disappear randomly from frame to frame.

They usually appear on the ground, and very rarely the walls. These screens are the only place I've seen them on the walls, but they just happen to be the screens I took.

(Click to make huge):





My first thought was obviously that my card was defected. I overclocked it a week or two ago, but I didn't touch the voltages, the highest I went was 850/1200 (from 725/1000 - and I only noticed slight artifacts at that clock and went back down to 800/1125), and temps have never gotten above 55C, even under heavy gaming. Wondering if the overclock was unstable, I went back to stock and restarted the PC. Still have artifacts. I then underclocked the GPU to the lowest possible in MSI Afterburner: 545/750. Still got the artifacts. Is it possible that I could have damaged the card?

It gets even weirder. I did a little bit of experimentation with the settings and I found out that the artifacts only occur at 2x MSAA and 4x MSAA. No MSAA (1x) and 8x MSAA are just fine. This appears to be the only factor that affects whether I get the artifacts or not.

I can sometimes play multiplayer with 2x MSAA and things are just fine. It only seems to get triggered on certain maps (usually snow maps). It appears often in the single player game, though (again, almost always on the ground surface).

So, any ideas? I'm using Catalyst 10.2. I could try the 10.3 preview but I doubt that would fix anything.

Bug in the game or bad GPU? Should I RMA the card (it's only about a month old)? I really want to be absolutely sure the GPU is bad before I RMA. i7 mobos don't have onboard video so I would basically be stuck without my PC for a month or so (and I can't steal a crap card from another PC - my last machine used AGP graphics).

Thanks so much for help and/or opinions. :D
 
UPDATE:

It appears this is NOT an issue specific to my card. Others with 5xxx series cards have reported the exact same issue here (complete with video):
http://www.overclock.net/ati/681916-xfx-5870-artifacting-bad-company-2-a.html

So, I guess it's a driver issue or something. Anyone else with 5xxx series cards experiencing this? Particularly in snow levels. It's apparent that this is not an issue specific to my card but I would like to know how widespread the problem is and if there's anything we can do to fix it. :)
 
Haven't experienced any artifacting on my stock 5870.

My friends with Nvidia cards load a hell of a lot faster than I do into MP games though =/
 
Nvidia cards load a hell of a lot faster than I do into MP games
that is how N is putting their name on the front ?????
The co gets a couple of hundred grand and A users get screwed to make you want an N card.
 
I know it sounds completely unrelated to a graphics type problem, but try running the game in Admin mode...For whatever reason, this fixed 3 or 4 issues for me, including graphics anomalies.
 
Shpongle said:
I know it sounds completely unrelated to a graphics type problem, but try running the game in Admin mode...For whatever reason, this fixed 3 or 4 issues for me, including graphics anomalies.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion, but it's still happening. :)
 
I was just playing and I noticed this problem as well. Found my way here and I can confirm that the problem only occurs at 2x and 4x msaa. I set it down to 1x and now the artifacts appear to be gone. Kind of annoying but at least I don't have a defective board...
 
izzypizzy said:
Haven't experienced any artifacting on my stock 5870.

My friends with Nvidia cards load a hell of a lot faster than I do into MP games though =/
Click to expand...

the dx10 shader compiler is slow for ati cards.

it's on ati's end, they'll need to fix it in a driver update. dx9 has fast loads.
 
probably driver issues, I know with my gtx260 I had horrible, unplayable artifacts I assumed were over heating or gfx card probs. Turnt out my old drivers were the problem, new drivers fixed them. but since you say others are having it I guess you will have to wait till new oens come out, hopefully soon for ATI users as there also plauged by slow load times.
 
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