7900XT Artifacting? Or something else?

[Fastfishy2]

As shown in this photo, I've noticed these black squares very rarely popping up in some games, first noticed it on GTAV: Enhanced on some of the character's hands and was able to replicate it in 3Dmark Speed Way.
Core temps under 70c / Vram temps under 81-82c. Latest Adrenaline drivers (was also happening on the previous driver set). Win11 Home.
CPU temps are also fine, literally nothing is abnormal temps wise.

Specs:
5800X3D / 32GB DDR4-3200 / Corsair Nautilus 240 RGB
Asus ROG B550-A
Sapphire Pulse RX 7900XT (no overclocks applied)
Storage: 1x Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1tb, 1x Evo Plus 2tb, 1x Samsung QVO (Sata) 2tb - most games are running off the NVME drives as is windows.
PSU: Corsair RM 750x 2021

I'm trying to figure out if this is a hardware issue, because if it is I can RMA the card, but I need some way to prove this to the retailer. Which I understand is easier said than done, as these little blotches pop up for a fraction of a second (although you can sometimes predict the general area in a given 3Dmark run they might appear. But they don't appear every run, and never in exactly the same place).

 

[Sydneyblue]

I would send it back

 

[FreedomEclipse]

From what I hear about GTA Enhanced. It's just low effort Rock Star things.

If it doesn't happen in any other games then get a refund for GTA Enhanced or Search how to roll it back to the older game like a lot of people have been doing

 

[eidairaman1]

Play other games

 

[3x0]

Download memtest_vulkan and see if any errors popup after 30mins of testing https://github.com/GpuZelenograd/memtest_vulkan/releases

 

[Fastfishy2]

Download memtest_vulkan and see if any errors popup after 30mins of testing https://github.com/GpuZelenograd/memtest_vulkan/releases

already ran a 1hr test of OCCT Vram test and it found no errors. I'll try underclocking the memory and see if that works.

From what I hear about GTA Enhanced. It's just low effort Rock Star things.

If it doesn't happen in any other games then get a refund for GTA Enhanced or Search how to roll it back to the older game like a lot of people have been doing

This screenshot is from 3Dmark Speed Way, so it's not just GTA doing it.

 

[eidairaman1]

Fresh drivers

 

[3x0]

already ran a 1hr test of OCCT Vram test and it found no errors. I'll try underclocking the memory and see if that works.

Memtest_vulkan is a lot more sensitive to instabilities.
Also, look for partial screen flicker while running the test

 

[vigor]

Most likely it's software related

 

[Fastfishy2]

I'll give memtest vulkan a go. Rolled my radeon drivers way way back and it made zero difference, so I wonder if it's some kind of specific issue to GTA V Enhanced and 3Dmark speed way's custom 4k version.

 

[NattyKathy]

Does it only happen when Raytracing is in use?
That looks similar to some artifacts I've occasionally seen playing Control on 7900XT with RT on...

 

[Hyderz]

Mostly likely it’s the game… wait for rockstar updates and AMD driver to patch

 

[DarkDreams]

I'll give memtest vulkan a go. Rolled my radeon drivers way way back and it made zero difference, so I wonder if it's some kind of specific issue to GTA V Enhanced and 3Dmark speed way's custom 4k version.

Speedway and GTA V enhanced both use ray tracing. Do you play any other games with raytracing that work fine?

 

[Fastfishy2]

Speedway and GTA V enhanced both use ray tracing. Do you play any other games with raytracing that work fine?

Speedway and GTA V enhanced both use ray tracing. Do you play any other games with raytracing that work fine?

Not often, but it's worth noting that Port royal benchmark doesn't do this at any resolution, although it has its own issues with subpixel light scattering that 3Dmark acknowledged to me about 8 months ago (super bright white lights at certain points on the benchmark) so idk

Does it only happen when Raytracing is in use?
That looks similar to some artifacts I've occasionally seen playing Control on 7900XT with RT on...

Memtest_Vulkan ran for almost an hour and detected no anomalies. Lowering the core speed by 200mhz and reducing the maximum power budget by 10% also did nothing. Little black squares pop up at the same point in every test run.
Edit: I ran Control with RT turned up a smidge below maximum for about 10 minutes. Never saw these things popping up.

I decided to post this question in 3DMark's steam community discussions page and received this response from the developer less than 6 hours later. In short, they are certain it's not a hardware issue, but they're looking into whether it's a driver or benchmark issue.

"Developers looked at those screenshots. and this is 100% certainly not a hardware issue. RMAing your GPU will not do anything.

It is unclear if the root cause here is the driver or the benchmark. Effectively a small part of illumination calculation ends up having a divide-by-zero, which in normal scenario should be caught and never end up in the final image, but apparently in some scenarios it ends up there, causing this minor visual glitch. Our guys are looking into this but not yet sure what the proper fix is.

In any case, this is purely cosmetic and does not affect the benchmark scoring in any measurable way, and is not caused by the hardware."