Friday Challenge: this is a weird one!

[da.Guvna]

Right, I'm having an absolute major pain in the ass headache over this...

I recently gave my dad a Point Of View AGP 6800GT to use in his PC. The thing has been running like an utter trooper in my old PC for almost a year now, flawlessly.

Uninstalled his previous card in safe mode, put 6800 in, reinstalled drivers (latest nvidia forceware), desktop is looking good. Suddenly, Far Cry doesn't work properly. Objects missing from the screen, walls are invisible, artifacts everywhere.....looks like it's been heavily overclocked or something.
Load up Hitman: Blood Money.....everything renders beautifully, no problems there.

"Must be a problem with Far Cry, dad. Try re-installing it with all patches etc."

Makes no difference.

Install Oblivion to see if that works ok.....nope, same kind of graphical issues. Most of the scene is missing, random shapes are being rendered/stretched across the screen in no particular order. Getting a bit weird now.

Dad gets fed up, so totally formats his HDD and re-installs windows + all updates.
Re-installs latest nvidia forceware and games, problems STILL persist.

I thought perhaps the drivers were not compatible with his card, so I went to guru3d.com to get some back-dated 84 series drivers. Checked compat. list, everything looks good.
Ran Driver Cleaner Pro in safe mode (having already uninstalled the card's drivers) to make sure there was no badness left behind.
Installed new drivers - WHAM! Still looking crappy!

The only thing I can think left to try is to uninstall DirectX9.0c and re-install it to make sure that isn't corrupted. However, I ran dxdiag.exe, ran the DirectDraw and Direct3D tests, and everything is fine, and it doesn't find any corrupted dx files.


So, to recap:

1.) 2D graphics functions are fine,
2.) 3D scenes are highly broken up (missing 75% of the scene), with loads of artifacts and random shapes everywhere.
3.) Hitman: Blood Money runs just fine!?
4.) Have tried both the latest 9-series WHQL forceware drivers, and older 8-series....no good.
5.) PC has been totally formatted and re-installed from fresh, so there shouldn;t be any driver conflicts/corruption.
6.) Card is NOT overclocked, nor have I altered the BIOS or anything funky like that.
7.) I KNOW this card works in my dad's PC, as it originally came in his case and he used it for a couple of weeks before he gave it to me.

I'm utterly at a loss as to what could be causing this.

Any help would be massively appreciated!

[Curly]

seems you covered most bases there, you could check the psu, maybe the card is overheating, make sure the power to the card is running on it's own line, not after a hd or cd (if you know what I mean) can't think of anything else but that just a few things to try.

Curly

[alsenior]

84.21 drivers are very stable but i have had trouble after trouble with the latset drivers and it appers alot of people hav had the same or siamler problems as this. try the above and then try to get these older drivers.

[chuckskull]

Sounds like power. Does it use the 6 pin PCI-E connector. Is it connected, it is getting enough juice?

Try reseating the card, often helps.

I know you haven't over clocked it, but try dropping the speed slightly anyway, sometimes helps.

If none of that works try it another PC, to see if you damaged the card itself while removing/installing it.

[da.Guvna]

The extra power come from a 4-pin molex connection on the card, which is plugged in but I'll double check to make sure it has it's own line.

I'll try re-seating it as well.

It's just so odd that it works in Hitman still!?

[da.Guvna]

Well, we tried ensuring that the extra power came from a dedicated line to the PSU (not daisy-chained from another device) and it still made no difference.

A bit more info for you....we can turn all the details up to max in Hitman, and it runs perfectly well....however, as soon as AA is enabled, we just get a blank screen.

Any more ideas?

[rich_225]

have u tried it back in ur old rig? sounds heat or power related to me. any cooling fans in case? or maybe psu? what ur dad got? a generic 250w?

[da.Guvna]

nVidia drivers report the card as running at about 60 C under load. It used to run at 77 with no probs in my old rig (as it was a confined shuttle case), so 60 should be fine.

I can't put it back in my old PC for testing because I sold it, lol.....I've got a laptop now.

As for power, it's only a generic PSU, but I'm pretty sure it's more in the region of 450W.
I'll double check this evening and let you know.

Cheers for all the responses so far btw!

[Jodo]

Everybody covered everything else but I think you might have said it at the end of your original post. I've got a 6600 which ran great for months and then I got artifacts only in certain games (PES most notably, pitch and shadows not rendering properly). Dxdiag showed everything fine but I'd checked everything else so got a removal tool and reinstalled Dx9.0c. Must have been corrupted because everything was fine after that.

[da.Guvna]

Dxdiag showed everything fine but I'd checked everything else so got a removal tool and reinstalled Dx9.0c. Must have been corrupted because everything was fine after that.

I don't suppose you can remember what the tool was called/where you got it from?

I'm not sure if it will help or not, as I would have thought that re-installing XP would have fixed a corrupt DX9 installation, but I'm willing to give it a try just in case!

Cheers.

[Jodo]

I think it was "Directx Eradicator 2.0" from Softpedia.com. I tried 2 or 3 until I found one that was free and I think that was the one. Also, it's pretty obvious, but make sure you download a fresh install of 9.0c (or whichever version you use) because the install you have might be slightly corrupted in some way. That would explain the same problems after a complete XP reinstall if you used the same Directx install.

[da.Guvna]

Ok, cool. Just let dad know, so he's gonna give it a try

[Golden Dragoon]

Well, we tried ensuring that the extra power came from a dedicated line to the PSU (not daisy-chained from another device) and it still made no difference.

A bit more info for you....we can turn all the details up to max in Hitman, and it runs perfectly well....however, as soon as AA is enabled, we just get a blank screen.

Any more ideas?

This is a bit far out, but possible:
One of the memory chips on the card may have become damaged (static discharge, physical or otherwise) and without AA hitmans graphics fit into the undamaged part of the memory as do the DX tests, but as Oblivion and FC are very detailed games they don't and are using the faulty memory chip causing errors.


It is but one possible explination, and I doubt it is correct, as I think the card would simply fail to boot with damaged memory, but you can never be certain of anything, at least that is what experience has taught me.

[da.Guvna]

Yeah, I think my dad has pretty much resigned himself to tha fact that the card must have become physically damaged during the move to his new PC. I'm gonna see if I can find a spare PC at work to test it out in first though.