GPU Artifacts and Crashes: Reading the Visual Symptoms

What artifacts look like

Artifacting is a broad word for the picture going wrong in ways that have nothing to do with the game's own graphics. The pattern matters, so describe it precisely rather than saying the screen 'glitched'.

• Flashing or dancing pixels scattered across the image
• Solid coloured blocks or squares, often in a repeating grid
• Horizontal or vertical lines running across the whole display
• Textures that look scrambled, stretched or replaced with noise
• Long spikes of geometry shooting off models — often called polygon spikes
• The screen going black for a second and returning with a notice that the display driver stopped responding and recovered
• A hard black screen under load with fans spinning up, needing a restart

What can produce it

Checks worth doing before you buy anything

1. 1

   Swap the cable and the port

   A tired DisplayPort or HDMI cable produces sparkle and dropped lines that look alarming and cost nothing to rule out. Try a different cable and a different output on the card.

2. 2

   Check whether it appears before Windows loads

   Restart and watch the manufacturer logo and BIOS screen. Corruption there happens without any driver involved, which moves suspicion firmly onto hardware or cabling.

3. 3

   Return clocks to stock

   Disable any overclock, factory OC profile or undervolt in the tuning software. If the artifacts stop, the card was being pushed past what it is stable at — which is a settings problem, not a dead card.

4. 4

   Watch temperatures while it happens

   Run monitoring alongside the game. Corruption that appears only once the card reaches its limit is a cooling problem wearing a graphics-fault costume.

5. 5

   Do a clean driver reinstall

   Fully remove the existing display driver rather than installing over the top, then install the current release for your card from the manufacturer. Layered driver installs are a genuine source of instability.

6. 6

   Test a second application

   If one game artifacts and everything else is spotless, suspect that title's shader cache or its own bugs before condemning hardware.

7. 7

   Reseat the card and its power connectors

   With the machine off and unplugged, confirm the card is fully home in the slot and every required PCIe power connector is firmly clicked in — including the second one people forget.

What artifacts do not prove

Plenty of cards that arrive described as 'artifacting and dying' turn out to be stable once the clocks are at stock, the cooler is clean and the driver stack is rebuilt from scratch. Visual corruption tells you the graphics path is producing bad output. It does not tell you the silicon is permanently damaged, and it does not on its own justify buying a replacement card.

• It does not prove the GPU is dead — drivers, heat, clocks and cables all produce the same symptoms.
• It does not prove the power supply is fine either; a marginal PSU shows up as crashes under load.
• It does not rule out the monitor, which is the cheapest thing on the list to test.

When to hand it over

If corruption survives a clean driver rebuild, stock clocks, a known-good cable and healthy temperatures, the next step is testing the card in another machine and testing another card in yours. That is the point most people run out of spare parts, and it is exactly what a bench is for. Bring it to the shop in Bellevue and we will isolate whether the card, the board or the power supply is at fault before anyone spends money on a replacement.