Graphics Issue

[Aegis]

Recently, I have been attempting to play some games (Pariah, KotoR II) on the PC, and been experiancing odd issues I had never seen before. Essentially, the video in the games become blocky, taking a focal point in the centre of the screen, and extending a large, mono-coloured triangle across the screen, essentially blocking view of the game environments (and everything else). There is nothing I can do to remove said blocks, and they just accumulate until I can no longer see anything save this assortment of blocks.

I suspect it is a memory leak, but have no way of telling for sure.

I am running 768 mb ram, with a Radeon 9800 128 mb pro video card. The process is ancient, as is the motherboard, but I do not suspect those are the issues. I also have the most current catalyst driver (6.8) for my card, which has only helped the issue slightly.

Any thoughts?

[Xandax]

Hmm - it sounds as a problem I've experienced before/heard of before although never regularly, but I do not recall the actual issue.

I'm unsure it would be a memory leak or similar memory error, as I be puzzled if that could result in such a problem - not that it couldn't be, I'd just never seen or expected such an description to origin from it. Usually memory errors leaks simply result in sluggish performance and bad memory mostly result in "blue screen of death" type crash ... in my experience anyways.

My thoughts would be the card itself either can't cope (heating issues for instance) or that it perhaps is defect.
Or perhaps it could be a driver/Direct X issue. I'd start here personally. Try to upgrade or downgrade your drives (new drivers and old hardware can conflict in strange ways).

Have you played the games in question before on the machine/setup withouth problems? Is it all (3D) games? Or only a select few?
Do you have the possibility to test out the card on another machine?

[Malta Soron]

And is your computer overclocked? (If it is, you probably already thought of that, but just in case you forgot to.)