My 4870 is making yellow snow

B

B2BigAl

2[H]4U
Joined
Mar 23, 2003
Messages
2,076
That's right, yellow snow. I first noticed it in Crysis, on certain walls there was yellow snow artifacting. So I fired up ATI tools artifact tester, and let's just say it's gonna be a yellow Christmas if this keeps up. Is this a driver issue anyone else has run into, or is one of my cards hosed. I just bought them, so I can exchange them, but I want to make sure this isn't some weird, known issue first.

Oh yeah, almost forgot. Anyone think it could be the PSU (in my sig)? It's not crossfire certified or anything, but it should be able to handle it I would think. Didn't the [H] test rig only pull like 480 watts?
 
ouch, that's getting me worried a bit, though have you checked your temps on the cards so far??
 
Yeah, I've been watching the temps. They're getting up to ~78 under load. At the risk of my hearing, I tried cranking the fans all the way up to 90% and I'm still getting artifacts. I probably should have said this before, but it does it overclocked or at stock settings.
 
I would say it is your PSU but I'm no expert. CF 4870s and 3 hard drives is quite a load.
 
How old is the psu. It does sound like it could be just a little underpowered for crossfire.
 
Good idea, check your psu.. though I have started to see some issues come with people with these cards... hopefully its nothing to crazy.
 
There's a known software issue with Crysis that causes white dots to appear on rocks and some walls in DX10 mode. But it sounds like you're experiencing some other issue.

Maybe try running only one 4870 card a time to find out if one of them is faulty?
 
The psu should be enough for the crossfire, but i'm questioning w/ the 4.0 c2d though. Take out one of them to see if it runs fine. If it's still messed up, it is the drivers.
 
Agreed, before you blame the PSU, start trying to narrow down to see if it is just one card. If one of the cards makes artifacts by its self and the others don't then RMA that sucker ASAP.
 
Okay, after some fooling around with the GPU memory, I think it's the culprit. I cranked it up to 1100MHz in CCC, and the the ATI tool artifact tester looks like a damn yellow blizzard. So I backed it down until there were no more artifacts, ended up at 1050Mhz. Then, I fired crysis back up and the artifacts are still there on the rocks and on a boat sitting on the river bank. I set the memory back to default just to be sure, and they're still there.

However, they're more what you're describing JimmiG, it's just white dots, and only on certain rocks, walls, and other objects. I think the problem is a combination of both things. I thought the white and yellow artifacting were the same thing, but that's not the case. The white artifacting is caused by the driver issue JimmiG mentioned, and the yellow artifacting is caused by the memory being overclocked too high. So when I cranked up the memory clocks, I just assumed it was a crysis issue and the yellow snow was the same as the white dots I had experienced at stock clocks. I didn't realize I had oc'd the memory too far, until I saw the artifact tester.

That said, the ATI tool artifact tester and CCC auto overclocking utility suck. Artifact tester showed no errors on the test, even though it was snowing like a son of a bitch. And CCC set my memory clocks to 1090 when I used the "Auto-tune" function, which was obviously way too high. I figured it would have set a pretty conservative OC, apparently not.
 
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