GTX 660 in BF3 -- coolest artifacting you've ever seen (broken drivers or bad card?)

[Am*]

Faulty GTX 660 in BF3 -- coolest artifacting you've ever seen...

Just played some BF3 when I got this:

Dat artifacting...made it look like a scene from The Matrix or something.

The worst part was that the card was, as you can see, at 3D clocks (which were forced) which got me worried. Is this card artifacting due to dodgy drivers or is the GPU faulty? I've had this card for about a week and a half.

 

[NdMk2o1o]

I would say faulty card, never had anything like that from drivers only faulty cards, though best uninstall and clean install latest drivers or perhaps try a couple of previous ones to be sure. Is it just in BF3?

 

[Am*]

Only got it in BF3. After re-launcing the game, it went back to normal but the weird thing was, power usage of the card was at 40-60% when usually it's at 90-118%. I did a driver re-install (with the clean option ticked in Nvidia driver options) this card from my GTX 460 originally when I got it. Did not re-install the OS or used DriverSweeper or anything, since I figured going from Nvidia to Nvidia would be hassle-free.

 

[sneekypeet]

With Nvidia, downgrading a card will not take a driver re-install. However moving higher in the series always leads to driver issues. I would clean everything and drop in new drivers to see if that fixes things for ya. You dont need a new OS, but I would use a driver cleaner

 

[Am*]

Here's what my GPU power usage looked like when the artifacting happened:

Ridiculously low, as you can see. Raising the power target did not help, until I re-launched the game.

I would say faulty card, never had anything like that from drivers only faulty cards, though best uninstall and clean install latest drivers or perhaps try a couple of previous ones to be sure. Is it just in BF3?

But here's the thing -- I've had GPU artifacting before due to a broken card. When it happened, the desktop would also artifact until the system eventually came to a grinding halt. I relaunched the game without rebooting the PC first and it returned to normal. I'm wondering if this is a driver issue, as I had similar problems with my GTX 460 until the drivers got sorted eventually.

P.S. I don't know why AMD get such a hard time for bad drivers from people when every Nvidia GPU I've used from 200 series and up have had these consistent fuck ups every generation, due to the added bullshit clock profiles every time. If I hadn't bought into the whole 3D Vision malarkey, I would have definitely switched sides to AMD by now.

 

[Flibolito]

I would double make sure windows and DirectX updated. I have been in both camps and have had virtually no issues with Nvidia drivers but had massive issues for years with ATI back during the warcraft days .

The first artifacting screenshot looks like maybe faulty memory since its using textures from many different items and using them on environment so on. Just a hypothesis. Could also be a bad memory controller on the chip itself.

Is it possible to test in another system? Try getting 3DMark11 and heaven DX11 Benchmark tool to check the GPU. These two programs don't really stress the video memory much though but worth a shot.

 

[Finners]

im hoping drivers as mine did this the other day, hasn't done it since

 

[Am*]

Well I have bad news -- this card seems to be inherently faulty and I confirmed it for myself today.

Over the last couple of weeks it has been a major pain in the ass -- even when forcing a 3D clock and higher TDP on this turd, it randomly started throttling for no reason at ridiculously low temperatures (65C-69C) -- as you can see from the screenshots, I NEVER overclocked it during any serious use -- these are the default clocks that come with the card. Worst of all, I've been having the infamous "Nvidia display driver has stopped responding and was restored" error.

To add to this, GPU Boost, I have to say, is the biggest crock of shit that I have ever seen plague consumer graphics cards -- now OEMs have a variety of variable excuses that I've seen them use on the forums, closest one I can recall was for the Titan(ic) (your card is "boosting too high" or "thinks the temperature/load/*insert any other variable here* is higher than it should be) -- a BIG thanks to Nshittia for that, by the way. They're not fooling me one bit -- GPU boost is still just the same old vBIOS trickery bullshit they've been pulling since the 200 series GPUs to cheat AMD on power consumption charts, which I expected it to be, since GPU boost is NOT used on their workstation cards, else you'd have every online community complaining about this crap.

Now, as if it isn't bad enough that Nvidia are price gouging and pricing their low-end shitty cards one to two tiers higher than they should be, it seems even asking for a stable GPU clock is too much these days (I see lots of recent posts through Google with the exact same issue). I will be returning this turd as soon as I can and will not be ordering another 660, or any Krappler architecture card for that matter. I'll try again when Maxwell hits, but if it is anything like this piece of shit, I will be going AMD permanently for all my future GPUs. Sorry for the big rant, but the worst part is I just got 2 faulty memory kits in a row that I need to return on top of this, which I had to waste lots of time testing as well, and...well...I don't get paid by either of these companies to test their broken shit. Good thing I haven't sold my old card, because I came pretty close to selling it about a month ago.

 

[Kenshai]

My 680 is doing that in Blood Dragon. No other issues in any other game so far.

 

[Am*]

My 680 is doing that in Blood Dragon. No other issues in any other game so far.

I suppose artifacting is the new norm for Nvidia GPUs now...

This is now the 2nd game that's shown it artifacting -- and these are not some oddball indie/beta games, these are two of the most mainstream games you can buy right now -- if it can't stay stable in these games, it is worthless to me.

 

[ShiBDiB]

The bf3 honestly looks like something game and not card related. But if its also happening in the 2nd game my money is on driver issues

 

[Am*]

Then take a look at this image:

It randomly dropped to half its normal operating clock and just refused to come back up until I rebooted it -- the framerate eventually plummeted to 19-20 something FPS -- and as you can see, the temps were way below the threshold of an overheating card. Also I was using Kboost in the above screenshot, with which it should never have touched the clock speed until around 77C or 100% TDP usage on the card.

I've had my GTX 460 perform terribly on a lot of games due to driver/clock issues before -- but NEVER artifact like this. The above proves that the card is faulty.

 

[ShiBDiB]

Have you tried completely uninstalling your drivers and reinstalling them yet? It still seems game related to me.

Also have you tried running at stock clocks?

 

[Kenshai]

I suppose artifacting is the new norm for Nvidia GPUs now...

This is now the 2nd game that's shown it artifacting -- and these are not some oddball indie/beta games, these are two of the most mainstream games you can buy right now -- if it can't stay stable in these games, it is worthless to me.

Wouldn't say it's the norm, just on occasion. What do the clocks do in furmark or games other than BF3?

 

[Am*]

Have you tried completely uninstalling your drivers and reinstalling them yet? It still seems game related to me.

Also have you tried running at stock clocks?

Yes, I've re-installed them 3 times these past 4 weeks. The above screenshots you see are from a fresh install that I was temporarily trying out. The Far Cry 3 screenshot was running at default driver and GPU settings when it happened. It cannot possibly be a game issue if the GPU is throttling without any logical reason (temps are 66C-68C, power usage was just under 100%, GPU load was in the 93%+ range for BF3, I can't think of any other reason why it would throttle like this), despite me forcing the boost clock manually long before starting the game.

Also playing BF3 at stock clocks made them fluctuate like mad more often than not -- they would go from 870MHz to 1100MHz and my framerate was all over the place. For this, I don't blame the card, I blame the drivers. For the artifacting shown above, I blame the GPU and nothing else.

Wouldn't say it's the norm, just on occasion. What do the clocks do in furmark or games other than BF3?

1006MHz if I force 119% TDP -- sometimes it would boost to 1100MHz, sometimes it wouldn't, so I usually use K-Boost for all games. Furmark didn't find any artifacts but the above games, as you can see, did. The screenshot of Far Cry 3 is running stock clocks without K-Boost.

 

[Flibolito]

When reinstalling drivers make sure you turn off EVGA precision/afterburner or any software gpu related. then do custom install and select clean install. This ensures a proper install hope it helps .

 

[Am*]

When reinstalling drivers make sure you turn off EVGA precision/afterburner or any software gpu related. then do custom install and select clean install. This ensures a proper install hope it helps .

The Far Cry 3 screenshot was taken from a fresh install, dude... and even if the clocks were to blame for the throttling/bad framerate, it still does not explain why it was artifacting. Also I ALWAYS select the clean install option in Nvidia drivers.

 

[jumbaloo82]

I had this same problem with BF3 last week. I fixed it by reinstalling an earlier nvidia driver. The latest driver, 314.22, has quite a few problems with BF3 from what I've heard. BTW I also have a GTX 660.

 

[Am*]

Just to warn you guys that have said to have similar problems with your 600 series cards -- if you have ANY artifacting like the above, I strongly suggest to just RMA the card. Kept mine a little longer and put it on another fresh W7 install with older drivers just to be sure it was the card and, well...this happened:

...just driving around, when suddenly, I see this shit in front of my car:

When I got out of my car, it got to THIS:

when I switched weapons to my MP5/shotgun, I got this:

switching again didn't exactly help...:

eventually, it fucked up so badly that a scene that was supposed to look like THIS:

...became THIS (what I'd like to call "Blood Dragon on crack"):

Lesson learned. In future, any slightest fuck-up, be it driver-related or hardware-related with my future graphics cards, they will be going straight back the next day. I STRONGLY urge you all to do the same.

Now, I have to go downgrade back to my freaking VRAM-starved GTX 460.

Dear Nvidia,

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU..............

 

[d1nky]

that looks like a massive memory eff up, I had some older ati card where I fried the mem from heat and well it started going like the pics above.......

 

[Am*]

that looks like a massive memory eff up, I had some older ati card where I fried the mem from heat and well it started going like the pics above.......

Yup. The only problem is, you're talking about an old card; a barely over month old card that has never seen the slightest overclocking is never supposed to be this broken out of the box, and I've never had one this fucked up out of the box.

Gonna be extra careful with my next GPU. Furmark doesn't seem to test jackshit now, since they gimp their cards against it via the drivers (and since it doesn't use much VRAM these days). Suppose I'll have to use whatever the most VRAM-hogging and GPU shader-hungry game is going to be when I get it.

 

[Frick]

Yup. The only problem is, you're talking about an old card; a barely over month old card that has never seen the slightest overclocking is never supposed to be this broken out of the box, and I've never had one this fucked up out of the box.

Gonna be extra careful with my next GPU. Furmark doesn't seem to test jackshit now, since they gimp their cards against it via the drivers (and since it doesn't use much VRAM these days). Suppose I'll have to use whatever the most VRAM-hogging and GPU shader-hungry game is going to be when I get it.

You can RMA it for a reason. You get duds sometime, it's just the way it is. I hope it's speedy.

 

[d1nky]

battlefield 3 and more than likely 4, crisis3 and farcry3 are probably the best stress testers out there.

I could go crazy on clocks with this 7950 in furmark, heaven, firestrike, 3dmark11 and kombustor with little problems.... soon as I tried one of those games it would crash.

however I use kombustor to gauge my temps so I can set a decent fan profile or see if voltages are too much.

but yea agreed a dud card out the box it seems. I can remember I used to get a lot of the spikes like mountains, black triangles, funny looking skies and those coloured lines.

towards the end of its life the screen was constantly like it, took it to a store and tried it out and they said something about memory corruption. (I was a total noob back then tho, a kid probably below noob standards lol)

btw im talking about an old card with those artifacts!

 

[Am*]

You can RMA it for a reason. You get duds sometime, it's just the way it is. I hope it's speedy.

The problem is, based on this "experience", I'm not sure I want to go anywhere near a replacement. Will probably just ask for a refund this time.

 

[d1nky]

7950 would be a pleasant upgrade, seen some benches vs 660 and 7950 overclocked trumped a 660 oc'd.

or even 7970... 670 or higher...

possibly same card diff brand