Is it my Monitor or my VGA? HELP!

So as of late I have found a problem with either MY hardware or Frontier game's Elite: Dangerous when I noticed that when I would access one of the menus that my monitor (or vga) would spaz out with large black rectangle voids that would span horizontally across the screen. I tried alt+tabing and it continued to happen until I killed the game. Please help me! (I already updated/rolled back my drivers and I am running a stress test now on my vga and still no artifacts)

specs: g3258 @ 4.5 ghz,game is on a 120gb ssd, hd 7950 (I can't overclock that because the voltage is locked by gigabyte),msi z87m gaming and a fractal design Tesla r2 500w

Heres a lackluster example of what I am talking about on a VERY small scale (a good example is at around 7:08) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7a0Ulvz9NM

update: I did another capture (with vsync on) and got a the same "screen tear" reaction but when I replayed the capture, it wasn't there. What could this mean? Is my monitor dying?

It's called screen tearing, it's normal when your computer is not refreshing the frames as fast as the monitor, or they are out of sync.

That's all the info that I can come up with out of the tiny bit of information you have given. Video or more info/logs would be useful.

The best thing to do in that situation is to enable vsync, if that doesn't help then try enabling more filters to bring down your average fps if you enable AA and higher resolution that should slow things down a bit, basically what's happening is your graphics card is sending frames to your monitor faster than your monitor can cope with them so the monitor falls behind and screen tearing is the result, hope that helps.

That's the thing, I have vsync enabled.

What I would do is install fraps, check what framerate your game is running at and compare that to your monitors refresh rate.

Errr okay I'll try that but this doesn't look like screen tear to me. It's gotten to that point where there would be giant holes in the screen and the only way to restore the picture back to normal is to kill the game.

Does this only happen with the one game? Just want to clarify that it's not your gpu artifacting.

If anything, the gpu you are currently running is not powerful enough to maintain the framerate needed, even with vsync enabled you can get screen tears if it can't push the pixels. But it might not just be the gpu, if you cpu can't push whatever it needs to, framerate still drops.

Again, more data/info is needed.

well I did list my specs but I put all the settings on low and that's the only game that makes it happen. I am running msi afterburner at 1000mhz core and 1200mhz mem. I checked out msi afterburner while the game was running and it appeared to be changing the core and memory clock speeds on the fly.

Maybe it's because it's a dual core?

How many fps is the game running at?

Umm, since you are running Afterburner already... you could enable logs, start playing for a while and post those logs, either in a screenshot format or upload the file. Make sure the logs are capturing everything though, temps included.

There is a very high chance that things are being thermally throttled, or are just plain borked. If the clock speeds are changing around erratically, it can be the signs of a dying chip.

1 Like

I have been having similar problems as well but with different games. I have experienced this with resident evil 4 and mass effect 1. Resident evil 4 is the worst as parts of the screen will go blank where as with with mass effect i get the occasional tear. It doesn't seem to be happening to other games i play like skyrim devil may cry 4. Just to clarify i have a 7970 from sapphire clocked at 1100 on the cor and 1522 in the memory. I have tried setting it back to base clocks and still have the same things happen.

Before freaking out, I'd recommend swapping out your cables. A shitty VGA cable can mess everything up. Not sure if it is causing the issues you are describing, but it's worth a shot.

Edit: I didn't realize that there was a 7950 with VGA out (unless you are using a converter)

People who say VGA these days... VGA = GPU. Kek.

Video graphics adapter?

Great idea. I'm going to do logs on Elite and I'm gonna run msi kombustor for like 5 mins too just for the heck of it.


here's the results for running kombustor for 10 min. I don't see anything irregular. Do you?

update: this is the test with elite and I did get the "screen tear" effect with this one. https://www.dropbox.com/s/cgrr1cg1n4z2nh8/test2elite.hml?dl=0

Umm, okay then. Are you able to add the FPS/Frametime to the logs? The clock and memory speed changing are very strange though.

heres the log with frame rate and frametime: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ruv3jxdgfecxd09/test3elite_withframe.hml?dl=0