Video Card Problem? Weird disfiguration while playing games

What's up with this? I've been trying out some PC games and on a majority of them I get this same effect (sometimes in text, sometimes in graphics).

Here's what I mean

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I have an ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 with Windows Vista

Assuming the typical troubleshooting steps, like updating drivers, have been done, I'd suspect a failing or overheating video card. Getting that sort of corruption in more than one game is usually a sign of hardware issues, and it almost always comes back to being heat related. Does it happen immediately or after you've been playing for a few minutes/hours? That would definitely be a sign of overheating or heat damage.

[quote5c7367e340="dmorris68"]Assuming the typical troubleshooting steps, like updating drivers, have been done, I'd suspect a failing or overheating video card. Getting that sort of corruption in more than one game is usually a sign of hardware issues, and it almost always comes back to being heat related. Does it happen immediately or after you've been playing for a few minutes/hours? That would definitely be a sign of overheating or heat damage.[/quote5c7367e340]

Well, it's kind of confusing. It always happens right when the game starts.. as if it's "part of" the game. What confuses me is that I have Oblivion, which is a pretty heavy-duty game, and I've never had this problem. That works fine. Before optimization it ran pretty slow... but still no graphics problem. Yet on a 10mb 2D game I DO get this effect.

I had similar issues before with my 7600 GT. I would play counter strike source and after about 5 minutes get some pretty ridiculous artifacting. Then i would play company of heroes and it would go fine, however it did go downhill. Soon i started seeing that similar effect that you have just in windows and eventually my PC would reboot and later the card died all together. I had to get it RMA'd.

its wierd that it would not happen during Oblivion though. Do you have any video card stress tests you can try? 3d mark or something like that. I would suggest running somehting like that to really press your cards limits. If it does fail or artifact or anything, then i would see if you have a warrenty. Dmorris is most likely right that its heat. The sad thing is it will never get better, and heat damage is unpredictable and doesnt effect you ALL the time. but it does get worse and theres no way to stop it once it has started really.

I get that problem when i over clock my card a little to much or the card over heats

My wife has been having a similar problem where her screen would turn all different shades of shit, and it only happened when either of us would be behind it switching between speakers and headset.

Turned out that every time we'd unplug the speaker wire, it would tough the inside of the video card because the back of the case is slightly exposed.

Unplugging the monitor and plugging it back in fixed it, but I'm not sure if you get behind there or not.

You don't even have what a person would consider even a decent graphics card. I have that same chip on my laptop (1250) and it's really just for Vista.

It seems to be overheating to me.

You can download a program called coretemp and realtemp and check on the temperatures.