9500-9700 softmod artifacting in Windows

Hi

Just purchased a 9500 second-hand from a forum member and it appears to mod fine to a 9700. Playing games I've come across virtually no artifacting whatsoever. However in Windows, using Irfanview to view any jpeg that's larger than my screen resolution (16x12) that requires scrolling, I get the following dot pattern:

http://www.sloanfamily.f2s.com/artifacting.jpg

I don't just get it in Irfanview, other applications such as the Omega driver splash screen exhibit similar patterns but other apps such as xnview can display the large jpegs fine.

Now this isn't the usual chequerboard pattern that everyone talks about, and I'm wondering is this likely to be bad pipelines or maybe overheating due to the gpu running hotter when soft-modded? Dropping down to non-softmod drivers and the effect disappears.

Any ideas? It's a shame as I can put up with minor artifacting in games for the huge performance increase but not in Windows :(

If it is overheating then you could fit an arctic ice cooler, that should fix sort any overeating problems.

I'm planning on putting a heatpipe on the card, either a Zalman or an Aerocool which should cool it. However I'd like to work out the cause fo the problem first as if I can't get it working at 9700 speed consistently it may get relegated to little brother's PC and I don't want to waste money on a heatpipe for him

The heat arguement doesn't make sense, why would scrolling a large jpg create more gpu heat than playing games?

It's to do with continuous blocks of memory. Games use small polygons and shaders whereas a large jpeg is stored as one large continuous block. As such artifacts can be more likely to show on such images.

Makes sense, does the file size of the image make a difference? Just use either plain white or black and save as extremely low quality image (but keeping high res) to test.

It does seem to make a difference with Irfanview, but I'm not sure if that's just how Irfanview or the display drivers display/store images that require panning.

Zathras your PM box is full.

Rich :¬)