I recently purchased a new ATi video card for my system after having a GeForce4 MX440. Everything has been smooth, but there have been several noticeable problems. One occurs while playing ET on Goldrush map.
I get red laser dots and strange colors on some textures, including the sky. I know these shouldn’t be there and this problem never happened with my NVidia card. I have the latest drivers.
Specs:
P4 @2GHz
256 RAM
Radeon Xtasy 9600 256MB
800 MHz FSB
I’ve only seen that sort of stuff when I overclocked my ati card, it may be that your card is getting too hot
Possible, I only have a 250 WATT PSU also. Screenshot coming in a few minutes.
Idd. Hows the rest of the system performing?
And, have you removed ALL aspects of the old drivers? Theres another thread (meLonF’s on GPU/CPU) that gives information about tools used to remove drivers from deep within the OS that wouldnt be done using uninstall.exe’s and add/remove programs.
Also check yer Direct X is latest. One big thing loads of people forget about…
Almost every other game is fine. I get some other glitches but none as noticeable as this.
As far as outside of games, there are some strange things. Like dots across the screen randomly, but I haven’t seen that in a while.
I get these splashs of colour when I overclock, possibly related to overheating of CPU/GPU
Is the card in fact new from shop or an RMA repackaged, does happen!
Download an nvidia driver cleaner, and also the ATI version http://www2.ati.com/drivers/cat-uninstaller.exe clean your system with both.
Then reinstall an ATI driver, I use catalyst 3.9
Good Luck 
SH
p.s. get a new power supply 350w minimum, from a well known company.
Is this a Sapphire card? If so, send the thing back. They’re known for that kind of corruption. Only problem is they take about 6 weeks to send you a replacement.
i used to get them dots, but they were cyan coloured, it suddenly stopped and i have a nVidea Ti4200 … so it probably is due to overheating, also along wid the dots, goldrush would be a nice tint on green. btw i only got the dots on oasis
yup - used to get that when I had an nVidia GeForce2 overclocked to hell - you get some really nice trippy visuals but something tells me that’s not what your after…
You can use ATITool to automatically scan for artifacts whilst stressing your card. It also lets you check and set the core and memory frequencies. Use the “Scan for artifacts” test to see if your card’s got a problem. If so, use forced cooling (i.e. point a big fan into your case) to see if that solves things.
HTH.
splotches like that can happen from bad/overclocked/overheated video memory.
Thanks a lot Lekdevil! I opened up my case and sat a fan right next to it with some steady cooling power and I went into ET… played for nearly an hour and it still looked beautiful!
ET after an hour
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