I think a bad cellphone camera video speaks 1,000 words here. (I apologize in advance for my complete inability to hold a camera steady.) For best results, put the video in HD and pay attention to the left-hand side of the screen, especially around the 00:17/00:18 mark.
I have a four month old 7950, and it's been doing this from basically day one. At idle (300/150 clocks) it works fine. At 3D speeds (850/1250), it works like crazy. But when it downclocks from 3D back down to those idle speeds, for ~30 seconds, I see those flickers on my screen. They can vary from barely noticeable to pretty blatant and annoying.
When I first noticed this I checked the monitor cables and made sure they were secure, and even tested on a different monitor--no change. Tried rolling back to 13.4WHQL via clean install; no change. (I'm currently on 13.9 WHQL.)
The "fix" I've found so far has been to enable AMD Overdrive, which puts the 2D/idle clocks at 500/1250. When the card shifts from 3D speeds to those clocks, no flicker. I can also then toggle Overdrive off, and the card seems to go from 500/1250 down to 300/150 without any noticeable flickering.
My incessant Googling has turns up threads like this one, which mentions flickering as a common problem with 79xx cards with too low idle speeds, which would fit with what I'm seeing...but it seems like most people experience more full screen flickering rather than what I'm seeing? And constantly at idle speeds, rather than just when the card is downclocking?
tl;dr: do I have the "super-low idle clocks" bug, or is this something else I need to be concerned about? Thanks in advance.
Other system specs:
i5-3570k
Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H motherboard
16GB DDR3 RAM
850W Corsair PSU
Win 7 x64
Edit: Should add that I've never overclocked, and I have hardware acceleration turned off for Flash and Firefox, so when I'm just browsing the web/watching YT, etc., my GPU stays at idle rather than shifting clock speeds constantly.
I have a four month old 7950, and it's been doing this from basically day one. At idle (300/150 clocks) it works fine. At 3D speeds (850/1250), it works like crazy. But when it downclocks from 3D back down to those idle speeds, for ~30 seconds, I see those flickers on my screen. They can vary from barely noticeable to pretty blatant and annoying.
When I first noticed this I checked the monitor cables and made sure they were secure, and even tested on a different monitor--no change. Tried rolling back to 13.4WHQL via clean install; no change. (I'm currently on 13.9 WHQL.)
The "fix" I've found so far has been to enable AMD Overdrive, which puts the 2D/idle clocks at 500/1250. When the card shifts from 3D speeds to those clocks, no flicker. I can also then toggle Overdrive off, and the card seems to go from 500/1250 down to 300/150 without any noticeable flickering.
My incessant Googling has turns up threads like this one, which mentions flickering as a common problem with 79xx cards with too low idle speeds, which would fit with what I'm seeing...but it seems like most people experience more full screen flickering rather than what I'm seeing? And constantly at idle speeds, rather than just when the card is downclocking?
tl;dr: do I have the "super-low idle clocks" bug, or is this something else I need to be concerned about? Thanks in advance.
Other system specs:
i5-3570k
Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H motherboard
16GB DDR3 RAM
850W Corsair PSU
Win 7 x64
Edit: Should add that I've never overclocked, and I have hardware acceleration turned off for Flash and Firefox, so when I'm just browsing the web/watching YT, etc., my GPU stays at idle rather than shifting clock speeds constantly.
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