Is DX10.1 worth upgrading to?

[Bounty_Bam]

I am running Vista Home Premium 64-bit.
My GPU is Asus 8800GT 512MB

I am getting a lot of "artifacts" in the graphics..

[rufeo]

sounds like your gfx card is overheating.... not sure why that has anything to do with upgrading to dx10.1.....

[Bounty_Bam]

When I play STALKER Clear Sky, its fine, ut when its starts raining in game, i get many multicoloured flashing blotches and lines everywhere.. I think these are artifacts right?

[rufeo]

sounds like artifacts.... can you post a screenshot so i can actually see what it is? does it happen in any other game?

[Agent]

Artifacts like you are describing are often caused by a faulty GPU or graphics card RAM. As Rufeo says though, post a screenie

[Mithrandir]

delete

[Bounty_Bam]

Heres some screenshot (had to use my mobile phone camera for some reason)


No rain:








Rain:








Just been playing for about 2hrs with no problem, got to Yantar and hit a storm :/

[Agent]

Do you get it in any other games?

[Bounty_Bam]

No, but then again I haven't played any other games in DX10...

Ive been told to install the nvidia BETA drivers (177) from my current release drivers (175).. just giving it a shot now

[Agent]

Give some other games a shot and / or download a few demos / benchmarks to check it.

Its too hard to say off one game, more so being Stalker which was quite buggy on release.

[Bounty_Bam]

Come to think of it, Ive played CoD4 and Blacksite with no problems... not sure if they are DX10 though.. Im sure Black site is.

The rain is fine in STALKER when played in DX9, thats what made me presume it was a DX10 fault

[Mithrandir]

Run THIS little demo/benchmark app in DX10 mode to see what happens.

[Bounty_Bam]

Results from the Tropics Demo:
8xAA 4xAA



All seems fine I think

[cougarslam]

try using atitool (it works for nvidia card too can test for artifacts,

how old is your 8800gt I had to update the firmware on mine to resolve the fan control issue.

[Bounty_Bam]

Uhm.. I bought it around February I think..

Is ATI tool safe for beginners? Im kind of affraid to do anything about hardware config incase i break something!

[rufeo]

Come to think of it, Ive played CoD4 and Blacksite with no problems... not sure if they are DX10 though.. Im sure Black site is.

The rain is fine in STALKER when played in DX9, thats what made me presume it was a DX10 fault

this sounds more and more like there's a problem with either the game or the drivers.... to make sure you can ati tool, haven't used it myself so can't tell you anything about that. what you can do quite easily is to bump up all the details etc in a game to max and stress the gfx card out that way. if it is the card's fault you should see some artifacts in other games and not just stalker.