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Lately I've been noticing some graphical oddities with my HD 4770 - blurry textures mostly - and now, when I try to play NFS: Shift, it's a mess of artefacts and green triangles. I've tried reinstalling the ATI drivers, which fixed things for about ten minutes, then checked the video card temps but they didn't look ridiculously hot (65°C during the graphical weirdness).

Anything not-gaming-related runs fine.

Any other diagnostics I can do? Is this the card slowly dying (shouldn't be, it's a year old and hardly pushed) or is something else going on?

Ram can go bad on a graphic card and kill it, the processor can become defective. There are three or four other things I'm thinking of that can die and kill the video card.
Graphic artifacts are bad no matter which way you slice it. And your symptoms pretty much exactly describe a video card that's starting to die.

Try out four or five other games and if you get the same issue (Ten minutes then jaggy hell) you might want to check the warranty.

So far it's New Vegas (all textures are blurry), Shift, and TOCA 3 (black lines).

And of course my warranty ran out in October. What's equivalent to a 4770 these days?

In terms of market positioning, probably the Radeon 6850, though it's kind of in flux right now since AMD is phasing out the 5000-series and bringing in the 6000-series. If you're looking for something with similar or slightly greater performance at a decent price, I'd try and snag a Radeon 5750 or 5770 before they disappear.

I'd recommend the 5770 in particular, as that's what I'm currently running. It'll chew through just about anything you can throw at it and costs about $130 on newegg, last I checked.

A 5770 will get it's rear kicked by 6850 for an extra 60$ over a 5770. Wait for deals the 6850 will hit 150$ for black Friday/Cyber Monday.

The 6000 series is already hitting circulation? Interesting, didn't know that. I haven't been keeping an eye on it's development or anything, so I don't know much about it's performance.

Joviwan wrote:The 6000 series is already hitting circulation? Interesting, didn't know that. I haven't been keeping an eye on it's development or anything, so I don't know much about it's performance.

It's essentially an improved 5000-series that runs cooler and is cheaper to make.

AMD have screwed with the naming scheme, though - the 6870 that recently hit the market is actually the successor to the mid-range 5770, and while it does perform quite close to the old 5870, it doesn't really outperform it with any consistency. Their new high-end chip, the 6970, won't be released until the turn of the year by all indications.

And what's on the Nvidia side? Would I be looking at a GTS450-ish card or is something else closer to the 4770 performance- and cost-wise?

Bounty wrote:And what's on the Nvidia side? Would I be looking at a GTS450-ish card or is something else closer to the 4770 performance- and cost-wise?

460's have been hitting the 140$ price point with the 580's release and it would outperform the 5770 depending on the game.

Wait three days now and check Newegg, there will be a 130$ ATI 6850 or Nvida 460 come Monday. Might even see them in the 110$ range who knows.