Strange Graphical Glitch

[AaronBekir]

Right guys, need a it of help, decided to boot guild wars up, and it looks like this.....

http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/9580/94482709.jpg

i have never seen this in any of my games, or ever on the desktop, i only have this problem in this game, ive updated the graphics driver to the latest, but nothing.

Any help would be great,

just as i was typing , though i would try WOW, does it in that too.... hopefully not my PC rejecting MMORPG's. lol!! It happens in game not just on the front screen.

Thanks

Aaron

[abigsmurf]

My guess would be slight overheating. Download speedfan and have it open when you play guildwars. After 5-10 minutes, look at the GPU/graphics card temp. It's possibly only happening in Guild wars because that's the only game you play windowed.

Other possiblities are:

Bad VRAM - unlikely, tends to get progressively worse and results in crashes.
Faulty Graphics card/chip - possible but unlikely to just affect one game and it's very hard to test for
not enough power from PSU - unlikely, usually results in crashes and random reboots rather than corruption.

[briareos_kerensky]

Agree with abigsmurf, most probably it's due to RAM overheating.

[NemesiS]

Its the graphics card. I have had that issue 4 times in the past where the screen starts getting artifacts all over the place. Had to replace the card every time It will only happen in games for now as thats when the GPU is required for the its intensive work, but if you leave it, it will start doing it on the desktop before it practically stops functioning altogether and all you'll get onscreen is a flashing hash of colour.

Might be an idea to check the power to the card also as if there aint enough your GPU will have been working overtime and burning itself out. So check your PSU when you replace the card.

Basically same view as Big Smurf on this. Your card is buggered.

[AaronBekir]

what sort of power should the psu have, basically i brought the PC in a barebones state, just the motherboard, processor, powersupply and case. I added everything else myself,
there are 2gb of ram and a 1gb ATI Radeon x1650.

if you could let me know what power the PSU should be i can go and check and sort it out.

Cheers for the suggestions, the thing thats gets me is it ONLY happens on WOW and Guild wars, i have tried every game i have installed (there are some real power hungry ones) and nothing.

Thanks

Aaron

[Strolls]

Power supply - try & find a mate with an expensive gaming PC & borrow his PSU for an hour. He won't thank you for the hassle of taking it apart, but it's better than spending £20 or £30 and finding it makes no difference.

IME it doesn't matter so much how "powerful" the PSU is, it depends on the quality of it. When the P4 first came out, everyone was going on about how the spec now called for 400W - now 500W & 600W PSUs are commonplace, but many OEMs put cheapo 370W ones in the machines you get at PC World & get away with it.

The difference between a cheap PSU & a good one is that the good one will put out a stable supply. You can often get away with a budget model if you buy one that's rated to a higher output than you'll use - IE if you think you need a 450W one, don't spend £40 on a top brand one, just spend £25 on a half-decent one that's rated for 650W. It will be able to supply a smooth 450W because you're not stressing it in the least. But at all costs, stay away from the really nasty ones that look really Chinese.

Have to say that from a second look at your screenshot it does look to me like the GPU is on the way out. When I first looked at it my browser resized it & it looked quite minor, and I was reminded of a bad cursor once I had on a Linux box (then surely down to a software versioning incompatibility). But when you see it at 100% you can see the spackles are consistent all the way across the GPU-accelerated window - I'm sorry to say that's exactly how my PS3 started off before it went completely tits up, wouldn't start up at all & had to be warranty replaced.

Stroller.

[abigsmurf]

you can get a reasonable look at the quality of your PSU by using speedfan. It'll list the voltages coming off of each power cable. The reported voltages will always be slightly off but it they're significantly off, you've a major problem. This is only one way of testing for a bad PSU though and some motherboards don't report the correct voltages anyway

You've a pretty old graphics card there so it is possible it's on the way out. Given the age of that card, you could probably get something of similar power for about £30-£40 now.