Graphic Problems

[Falgorn]

Hey All,

I have been having some pretty serious problems with my computer for the last while, and have been unable to find sollutions on the net. I have already consulated a number of people in my guild that work in IT etc, and have yet to find a sollution short of buying a new graphics card. Seeing as the problems seem to worsen as a result of playing WoW for any lenght of time, I'm going to sneakily make this post under the guise of a wow related issue in the hope that one of your industrious minds can assist in my ongoing dilema.

The Facts:

I bought and built my rig about 14 months ago. I have a Nvidia Nforce Mobo socket 939 with recently purchased Opertron 180 dual core 2.4 with 2mb cache.

The rest of my relevent system specs are as follows:
2 gigs ram (Corsair)
Gainward Nvidia 7900 GT 256mb
Sound Blaster Audigy (2004 ed.)
Seagate 512 HD.

The Issue:

When I play Warcraft I get random glitches around the screen. The more I play the worse they get, to the point that entire segments of the terrain are missing, invisible or stretched beyond recognition. Occasionally there is color distortion with patches of textures coming out in black white and red and other times I will be rotating the screen around my toon and it will white out completely - but return when I rotate a little left or right.

Whenever I try and run a video player after this happens, there is severe distortion over the image, and oddly, if I take a screenshot of the image and paste it, the pasted image will have the distortion flickering over it, even inside paintshop.

Odder again - running certain games will reset the graphics problems and all looks ok again for a while. Vietcong, supreme commander etc, work fine for this. Some times alt tabbing to desktop and back into the game can remove some errors for a short while.

Tested Sollutions so far:

I have ran memtest86 and it showed no errors in my ram (left it running for 9 hours)
I ran a graphics card stability test and it showed no errors or artifacts.
I have uninstalled my video drivers, and used driver cleaner and installed the latest drivers.
I have monitored my GPU and CPU temp when errors have occured and both were well inside safe range.

None of these have rectified the issue and the advice at the moment is to buy a new card. Past help seems to think its video memory but no one is sure.

Sometimes when I log into WoW the problems are severe right from the start, and sometimes it takes a while for them to get steadily worse.

I would consider my IT skills moderate to above average for a gamer, so if anyone can help or reply please dumb it down a little for me, .. but not too much.

If it would help I can post screenshots of the distortion!

Thanks for your time and help in advance.

[Perseus]

I wont claim to be an expert but it sounds like it could be a graphic driver problem specific to wow. Before spending any money I would personally un-install the latest drivers and go back 1-2 versions then re-try (77.76 should prob do). Some times the latest drivers might cause problems with certain games, if you go back a couple of versions then it might get around the problem.

With a bit of googling I also found this on the Nvidia forums but I cant say whether it works (or indeed what it does!)

'i found suggestion to remove SET gxApi "opengl" from WoW's Config.wtf, and it removed my glitches totally'

Hmm just found out some more there seems to be lots of similar problems http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=31232 should give some more information, but they claim its a blizz problem....

Good luck sorting it out :/

[Bandytas]

Had the same problem on my 7900GT, i tried everything, from driver changing, to wow reinstallation to format and windows reinstallation. Tried poking the tech guys at blizzard and nothing helped. Swapped to my old Ati card and everything was good. So yeah.. Probably wise to change your card. Sorry mate.

[Hammerschlag]

Wow all your guys' computers are from like 2007.