Artifacting is the name for visual glitches your graphics card puts on screen that shouldn't be there: coloured squares or checkerboards, stretched polygons that shoot across a game, flickering lines, sparkles on textures, or a screen full of green or purple noise. It's one of the most common reasons gamers bring a PC into our Midland workshop, and it's worth taking seriously, because it can be anything from a bad driver to a graphics card on its way out.
The good news is that a few simple checks will usually tell you which end of that range you're at.
What causes GPU artifacting?
Artifacts appear when the image the graphics card builds gets corrupted somewhere between the chip, its video memory (VRAM) and your monitor. The usual causes, from most to least fixable, are:
- Graphics drivers: a corrupted or half-updated driver can produce glitches, black flickers or crashes in one game while others run fine.
- An overclock: a GPU or memory overclock that was stable last year may not be now. Factory-overclocked cards can be affected too.
- Heat: a card running too hot, especially its memory, starts making errors. Dust-clogged heatsinks, dried thermal pads and failed fans all lead here.
- Power: a tired power supply or a loose PCIe power cable can starve the card under load.
- The connection to the monitor: a damaged DisplayPort or HDMI cable, or a faulty port, can look like artifacting.
- A failing card: worn-out VRAM or a cracked solder joint under the chip causes artifacts that no software fix will cure.
The quickest clue: when do the artifacts appear?
Before changing anything, note exactly when you see the glitches. It narrows things down more than any other test.
- Only in one game, or only after an update: most likely a driver or game issue.
- Only after 10 to 30 minutes of gaming: points to heat or power, as the card is fine until it's been working hard for a while.
- On the Windows desktop as well as in games: more serious. Check the cable first, then suspect the card.
- On the start-up logo or BIOS screen, before Windows loads: drivers aren't loaded yet at that point, so this is almost always hardware: the card, its memory or the cable.
Checks you can safely do at home
- Try another cable and port. Swap the display cable and use a different output on the card. If the problem disappears, you've found it.
- Remove any overclock. Reset GPU tuning software (such as MSI Afterburner) to defaults and turn off any memory overclock. If the card has a factory "OC mode" switch or profile, try its standard mode.
- Do a clean driver install. Download the current driver from NVIDIA, AMD or Intel and choose the clean install option, or remove the old driver completely first with a tool like Display Driver Uninstaller.
- Watch the temperatures. Use a monitoring tool such as HWiNFO while gaming and look at the GPU temperature and, if shown, the hot spot and memory temperatures. Readings that climb right before the artifacts start point to a cooling problem.
- Check the power cables. With the PC switched off at the wall, make sure every power connector on the card is pushed fully home.
If the glitches survive all five checks, the card itself, or what's feeding it, is the likely cause.
Stop if you smell burning or see scorch marks. Discoloured plastic around a power connector or a burning smell means switch off at the wall and don't keep testing. That needs a technician, not another driver install.
Can an artifacting graphics card be fixed?
Often, yes, when the cause is heat, power or software. A card that artifacts once it's warm can come back to life with a proper clean, new thermal paste and, where the memory is overheating, fresh thermal pads. A power supply that can no longer hold steady under load is a straight swap, and our post on choosing a power supply for a graphics card explains what to look for.
When the memory chips or the GPU itself are failing, a repair rarely makes sense against the price of a replacement card. In that case the useful question becomes which card to replace it with, and whether the rest of your PC will hold it back. Our gaming PC bottleneck checker is a good starting point.
How we test a graphics card in the workshop
When you bring a PC to us with artifacting, we stress-test the hardware under load, watch the temperatures, check the logs and test the card in a known-good system. Working through the cable, drivers and power supply as well as the card is what separates a graphics card fault from a power or software problem, so the fix goes on the part that's actually at fault.
Most desktop repairs get same-day diagnostics. If the card needs cleaning and repasting we can usually do that in the workshop, and if it needs replacing we'll check that the new card suits your power supply, case and processor before fitting it. See our gaming PC repairs for the other faults we fix.