Weird green screen hangs up computer when playing games

[Greizer85]

Hi,


I'm having some problems playing Civ V and as far as I can tell, all other games currently. First of all I'm getting weird 'static' (horizontal, wavy interference) near the center of my screen; it comes and goes, like on a bad tv or something. I don't notice it if the screen is bright usually, but when e.g. Civ V loads something and there's a dark screen I can see this 'noise' clearly. As far as I can tell this doesn't appear when I'm not playing games.

That's not my main problem though. That would be this: while I'm peacefully playing away, out of the blue I get a green screen with some darker, vertical lines on it. No text or anything; just bright green and dark green lines. This happens rarely enough, maybe every 3-5 hours, but so far it's consistent. The problem only appears in games, not in regular computer use. In Civ V the music sometimes continues to play, but other than that my computer totally hangs. The only way to get out of this state is to manually switch off case power and then just hope that Windows starts itself up again without hiccups. Obviously the situation is untenable... I just paid 1400 € for a new comp and I'm not going to fry it with this trickery! Not to mention that this interferes badly with my gaming and already corrupted one of my saves in Civ V.

I've tried both DirectX 11 and 9 in Civ V and while Dx9 runes smoother and with less 'static', the green screen problem persists just the same. Sometimes only the lower half of the screen flashes the green pattern for a second or so, and then corrects itself. Usually whenever I see green, it's the whole screen, hang -> reset thing though.

For the love of God, don't tell me it's a hardware problem... I can't afford to lose computer access now that I'm in the University again. Not to mention Civ access... Although on second thought, maybe that'd not be so bad after all.

-g

P.s. Here are some of my computer specs, not sure how relevant they are but here goes:

Processor: AMD Phenom II X6 1055T 125W, 6x 2.80GHz
Motherboard: ASRock 890GX Extreme3
GPU: Sapphire Technology HD 5870 Vapor-X OC 1 GB
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

If you need more info, just ask. I just want to get back to my civving... Rest assured I will have your statue on the main square of my capital if you can help solve this problem!

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Does the computer overheat? (There are temperature monitoring programs). This is my first impression.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Are your drivers up to date?

Also, here's a test you can do: when the artifacts show up, take a screenshot and save it. If they are visible in the screenshot, then the issue is with the game, but if you cant see them in the screenshot, then its something that happens afterwards.

 

[Greizer85]

Thank you for your answers.

@aimeeandbeatles: Now that I think of it, the problem does seem to become more frequent after I reset the comp once. I'll install some heat monitoring software later tonight.

@Genocidicbunny: I'll try that screenshot trick today also. My drivers are the latest version as far as I can tell. Perhaps I should try downgrading and see if that fixes it. I can live with slightly inferior graphics if I don't have to reset my comp every 3-5 hours. But I'll try the heat thingy first.

@others: Advice still taken, so chime in if you know anything about this kind of issue.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

SpeedFan is a pretty good free one, but head over to MajorGeeks site, IIRC theres several there.

 

[Greizer85]

I didn't have time to play yesterday, but today I played Civ V for only 2 hours and was greeted by a gray screen this time. I got it once before but it was a darker tint iirc. Variety is the spice of life as they say, but if this continues I think my Civving days are over for the moment.

I tried to take screenshots after I got the gray screen but they weren't saved. I didn't expect them to be, tbh. I did take a 'screenshot' with my camera though; I'm attaching it here. The quality is poor but the pattern should still be apparent.

As for the monitoring programs, I tried both SpeedFan and HWMonitor. SpeedFan claims something called "AUX" is at a 100 degrees C temperature! I'd think my comp would have caught fire a long time ago if that was truly the case. Indeed, Mr. Google tells me that it's most likely to be a 'false positive'. HWMonitor reports the same thing though, which is a bit worrying. Otoh it also claims my case fan is rolling @ 10000 RPM; if that were true, I would've gone deaf ages ago. SpeedFan tells me it's something like 1000 rpm, which is much more believable. The temps are all around 30-45 degrees C (after 2 hours of civving) so I doubt that it's a heat problem.

I'll await for your ideas. I'm beginning to fear it's a hardware problem... I'll wait for the Christmas holidays in that case before repairing. The lack of Civ should at least help the progress of my Lit papers... Certainly this 'wakeful anguish of the soul' will make a nice contribution to the one on "Ode on Melancholy"!

 

[Genocidicbunny]

You need to take the screenshot on the PC. If you take a photo, you get what you see, but when you take a screenshot in Windows, it actually takes all the data from a buffer. If the data there is corrupt, then the problem is likely on the driver end, while if its not corrupt there, but does show up bad its quite likely its either the GPU or the monitor.

 

[Greizer85]

Well, it totally hangs up my comp, so it's kind of hard to do that. I pressed the button a good 10 times but alas no pictures showed up.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Press Print Screen, open an image editing program, paste it in, and save it.

 

[Greizer85]

Press Print Screen, open an image editing program, paste it in, and save it.

Maybe I'm missing something here... How do I do that with my screen scrambled up? As I said the problem only strikes in games. And once it does, I can't Alt+Tab out of it. No matter what button I press, the screen stays messed up - so how do I go about this? Alt+Tab out of Civ blind-folded... Then hope to hit a shortcut to Paint.Net on the scrambled-up desktop? Well, I suppose I could already have it open in the background, then just use keyboard shortcuts. If it's only Civ V that hangs, then this should work. But I doubt that, since I've never had a crashing game 'infect' my whole screen like this. Then again I'm not too computer-savvy, and I'll take any shot in the dark if there's a chance that it helps. Hey - if a spearman can beat a tank...

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

There are some programs that can auto-save your screenshots so you don't have to ALT+TAB.. I used one before when a certain program was fussy but I forgot the name of it. Id give that a try, it might work.

 

[Greizer85]

Well, whatever this is it's getting worse. Spent maybe 5 minutes in game and there was first a brief flash of the pattern, then in a few seconds it swallowed up the whole screen. The music almost immediately stopped playing. I did try the Alt+Tab method; I had (only) Paint.Net open in another window and I tested the procedure several times in advance to be sure it works. But... As you can probably guess... No screenshot appeared in the file. And before you ask, yes, I remembered to hit Ctrl+V, Ctrl+S + Enter too. I did the entire sequence a few times in fact, just to be sure I didn't 'mistype' at some point.

So at least we know it isn't just a monitor problem, right? The system hangs up, not just the display properties of it. With my luck it's probably a bad motherboard... I was told people have had problems with this model, but then there were other people who reported no such troubles. Meh... I'll just stop playing games for now and wait for a big fat patch to fix the ******ed combat AI in Civ V. Thanks for your helps, folks, and ofc if you have more tricks up your sleeves I'm still willing to listen.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Try reinstalling the current driver version, and if that doesnt work, a couple of the previous ones too.

Since the system hangs, its not a simple artifact problem.

 

[Quintillus]

It's still possible that it's the video card alone entirely crashing and bringing down the whole system. I Googled your motherboard and it appears to have ATI 4290 integrated graphics built-in. You could try taking out your dedicated video card and running it with the integrated graphics, and seeing if it still crashes. If not, you've figured out what the problem is, and can still play games on low settings (not sure about Civ 5 in particular, but some games will play with that for sure). If it does still crashes, it may well be the motherboard. Either way, keep your warranty close at hand.

 

[Greizer85]

Well, I re-installed my video card driver, and also installed Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 (which my Civ V installation downgraded to 2008 for some reason). I was able to play without static for one hour, and thought "maybe it's fixed...", but I should've known better. I got a pitch black screen this time, and the music kept playing. I guess progress has to be measured in small steps in this case. I also has Paint.net open and tried taking a screenshot again, but to no avail.

Bleh. I'm done with this for the moment. I'll stop playing until Christmas and see about the warranty stuff then. I've got a ton of books to read and schoolwork to do, so it's just as well really. Thanks for all your help, folks, even though it didn't solve the problem.

 

[Turner]

There's a link to a screenshot program in my sig.....

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

^ Thats the one I used!

 

[Turner]

And you probably got it from me.

 

[Greizer85]

As a last shot (heh), I did install that screenshot program. As soon as my screen scrambled (a very clear, steel gray pattern this time) I hit the PrtScr button a good 20 times in rapid succession. It only managed to save one of those screenshots, and it was a pitch black one. The pattern was steel gray immediately, so what does this mean? That it's a hardware problem, like I suspected originally?

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Yeah. Means whatever the video card is outputting gets scrambled before the screenshot utility can even get to it.

Id do like suggested above, pull out your graphics card and try using the onboard one. This will narrow down the problem area.