Random green garbage, in-game

[bob]

Im not sure how to properly describe what im seeing, so instead of trying to babble on for about 20 minutes, ill just post a youtube-quality video : Video from oblivion

If you notice in the lower left-hand corner of my screen, you can see I have fraps running. At first when I noticed this problem, I hit F9 to record (FPS display turns red during recording). During recording, these random green squares dissapear completley.

System spec's :
Athlon 64 3000+ (Winchester core, no its not overclocked)
Gigabyte Geforce 6600GT 128MB PCI-Express (NO, its not overclocked either)
Gigabyte GAK8NF-9
Windows XP Home
Mushkin 2x512 DDR400
Sparkle 300W PSU

Ive had this box since late 2004/early 05. Aside from some problems with shadows in farcry (shadows would render as giant rectangles with max graphics settings), I had no other problems. I finnaly got ahold of another copy of oblivion after losing my copy, I noticed it seems to crash when it senses I havent saved in the past 20 seconds... It crashes often... every half hour I would say, sometimes it will go for 2 hours without a crash if im lucky. Nothings changed as far as hardware goes, the same old crap thats been in there since I bought it.

Anyways, Its now doing this in Scarface. Only for the water/ocean, I will have horrible amounts of these green squares flashing around on the waters surface, nowhere else. GPU temp isnt going much above 60-65C, cpu temp is barely 30C at full load.

Any ideas on where I should go from here? I would like to solve this problem.

 

[bob]

Bump

 

[BinarySynapse]

Sounds like video memory corruption. If you're not overclocking then you'll probably be looking for a new graphics card soon.

 

[Zinn]

make sure the fan in your 6600gt isn't clogged with dust. if you've had your system for awhile, you might find that it's time for a cleaning!

 

[wera]

SLI? this was a driver problem in old sli drivers... Just saying looks like core artifacts to me.

 

[MrWizard6600]

well its artifacting, just swap black for green. thats exactly what it looks like alright.

RMA the card. somethigns currupt.

 

[Frosteh]

Artifacting, probably due to heat, although with that PSU it maybe power related.

When you're running without fraps recording it will be video card limited, where by the speed of the rendering is limited by the speed of the video card, and so your video card will be redering as fast as it can.

When you enable fraps you suddenly become highly CPU/Hard drive limited, where by the CPU is struggeling to keep up with game calculations and the video card no longer needs to work at 100% to render everything in time and so throttles back using less power and causing less heat.

As for crashing in oblivion theres 100's of different reasons why it might crash, theres some really nasty crash bugs out there, if it's crashing on save's between areas, more specifically indoors and outdoors I'd definitely go for disabling auto save at these points, you also might want to try turning off HDR (if it's on) that helped a lot for me when I had crashes.