ASUS R9 290 blackout at night time game play

[Johndoe007]

Hello,

So I have a problem with my R9 video card and I want to bounce this off of you guys before I RMA it. So to start off with here is my systems spec's:
Intel i5 K2500 CPU
ASUS Maximus IV Gene Z Gen3 mother board
Corsair GS800 800 watt power supply
16GB Corsair Vengeance RAM
ASUS Radeon R9 290
Windows 7 Pro

I've been having problems with black outs. So I've updated the graphic card and processer drivers. I've also clocked the card back to 1050mhz and increased the fan to 65%. This has helped with the black outs but now I get them when the game is at night time and when I look at the ground. At first just Arma 3 Dayz and now on life is feudal same problem. Any suggestion or shall RMA it?

Thank you.

[elesde]

Is your GPU VRAM overclocked at all? Black screens, especially during gaming, are usually the result of an unstable VRAM.
Have you got any other games to test, preferably something with a DX11 render path to rule out driver problems?

[Johndoe007]

elesde wrote:
Is your GPU VRAM overclocked at all? Black screens, especially during gaming, are usually the result of an unstable VRAM.
Have you got any other games to test, preferably something with a DX11 render path to rule out driver problems?

The card had factory overclock settings that I knocked down by 200Mhz. As for other games I have tried to replicate it with 7 days to die which I believe it to be a directx 10. In a tunnel I dug I cant get it to black out. I'll try it while its at night time to see.

Thank you for the information. I'll try it and get back with you.

[Johndoe007]

elesde wrote:
Is your GPU VRAM overclocked at all? Black screens, especially during gaming, are usually the result of an unstable VRAM.
Have you got any other games to test, preferably something with a DX11 render path to rule out driver problems?

I just tried H1Z1 and I had no problems at all at night time and that is a DX11 game.

[elesde]

As far as I can tell from the Wiki H1Z1 does not have DX11 yet but no matter, you can also test the card via 3DMark or Unigine Valley benches.
May I ask what driver you are running right now? From my experience with the latest AMD drivers and older DX9 based engines it is not uncommon for rendering bugs to sneak in.

[Johndoe007]

I did a search on google for the DX for H1Z1 maybe I got bad information. I'll download the 3dmark and see what happens. I am running the Catalyst 15.4beta and driver packaging version 14.502. It's really odd how I can play H1Z1 and 7 days to die without any issues.

[elesde]

Looks like a driver issue, you might have to go back to 14.12. Also be sure to test 3DMark / Unigine with stock speeds, if it blacks out there I would go for RMA.

[Johndoe007]

Great I'll give that a shot. Thank you for all of your help. I'll let you know what happens.

[Johndoe007]

elesde wrote:
Looks like a driver issue, you might have to go back to 14.12. Also be sure to test 3DMark / Unigine with stock speeds, if it blacks out there I would go for RMA.

I ran 3DMark and it did have a 4/10th of a second black out around the 7 or 8th test. Ran fine the rest of the way. I rolled back the driver after that test and the problem got worse. During game day time running through thick trees it would black out and come back in to view once I was out of the trees.
I re installed the 15.4 beta and tried playing with stock settings to have the problem again in day time. I dialed back the settings back to 1000 Mhz with 65% fan and I am back to where I started. The daytime problem went away.

[elesde]

Yep would go for RMA as long as there is still time, maybe they can send you a new bios version or something to test but when things get better with lower clock and better cooling it does look very much like a hardware problem after all.