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I have a problem that's never occurred before. In the majority of games, part of textures are flickering and some weird white points / lines are randomly appearing on black textures. I already reinstalled the drivers, etc. but it didn't help.

Do you have any idea what it could be? Do I have to reinstall the whole system?

I have a laptop with i7, 8gb ram, radeon 5850 mobility and 7200 rpm hdd's.

UPDATE: this is the video, so you know how it looks like:

Anyways, you have you set the youtube video settings at HD at least, below 720p it is blended. I recommend 1080p

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  • sounds to me like your card may have been damaged in some way. Try opening up the CCC and turning off catalyst AI and/or most of the advanced features and see if this still happens.
    – l I
    Commented Dec 2, 2011 at 20:01
  • Well I just checked the Starcraft II and it is the only game running smoothly without any problems. So the graphic card shouldn't be damage, so what do you think?
    – ivan
    Commented Dec 2, 2011 at 20:18
  • i try to reinstall directx, perhaps those games using it suffer from that problem
    – ivan
    Commented Dec 2, 2011 at 20:46
  • the question is, how to reinstall the directx..
    – ivan
    Commented Dec 2, 2011 at 20:58
  • @ivan: not sure that you can anymore. As of DX10/Vista, DX is pretty tightly integrated into Windows to the point that I'm pretty sure you can't uninstall it.
    – Matthew Scharley
    Commented Dec 2, 2011 at 22:59

1 Answer 1

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Symptoms like these can sometimes be caused by overheating.

You may be able to diagnose this by "cold-starting" a game. Leave your computer completely off (no sleep/suspend mode, though hibernate is fine) for several hours, say overnight. When you turn in back on, immediately start a game and see whether the symptoms are lessened/abated until the computer warms up. If so, it's very likely an overheating issue.

In either case, it's probably worth doing a bit of "Spring" cleaning. Grab a can of compressed air, open any customer-serviceable sections of the computer (often, the keyboard, battery, and sometimes memory or HD slots) and give everything a few good blasts. Pay particular attention to any exhaust vents, which you'll usually find around sides of the laptop and sometimes on the bottom as well.

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  • Couldn't it be that some pixel shaders on the graphic card are dead?
    – theSpyCry
    Commented Dec 5, 2011 at 7:43
  • @PaN1C_Showt1Me — Hardware damage is another possibility, yes. Whether or not pixel shaders specifically are involved is beyond my knowledge of the inner workings of video cards. :-)
    – Ben Blank
    Commented Dec 5, 2011 at 7:49

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