[Issue] artifacts, but not in the normal sense.

Well, today, I've run into what might be the final days of my GPU. I was on Twitch.tv, when suddenly, I see about 6 discolored rectangle artifacts. Out of curiousity, I minimized firefox to get a closer look at what might be the grim reaper knocking for my GPU. After minimizing firefox, the artifacts vanished as fast as they showed up. Being slightly confused, but still wanting to watch something, I reopened firefox. Now the artifacts have returned, the awful streamer in the spotlight stream only made this worse. Trying to see these little demons closely again, I minimized firefox. Once again, the vanished. This happened about 3 times until the artifacts stopped showing up.
So, after this event, I ran furmark. To much confusion, after 15 minutes, my GPU was totally fine(was at 72c with max 77c). Currently I'm running memtest, because I switched to a new RAM recently(corsair: Vengeance 4x2 1600). No errors seem to be popping up, but I'm preparing my poor wallet in case the most likely event seems to happen.
To recall, my computer has always seemed to have odd issues with video players. My PC would BSOD from videos from vimeo, now I'm hoping, this artifact issue is just another video player issue(I can try and have faith in such a silly thing).

tl;dr: artifacts show up, then disappear with minimization of firefox. Repeat.

My specs:

GPU: MSI AMD RADEON HD 7870 2GB
MOBO: AsRock 970 Extreme4
CPU: AMD FX 8320 8core Black edition
RAM: G.Skill 2x2 4gb [upgraded to Corsair: Vengeance 4x2 1600]
PSU: CORSAIR GS600
HDD: Seagate Barracuda LP ST31000520AS 1TB 5900 RPM
OS: Windows 7

How big were these artifacts? I'd try reseating the video cable and potentially trying another one just in case that's the issue, I've had artifacts from a slightly loose DVI cable before. I'm guessing a screenshot could help.

Does it let you take a screenshot of the artifacts? If so, the graphics card is actually rendering that. Posting here might help determine the issue.

I'd start with a clean install of your graphics drivers, pulling the newest version.

thideras said:

Does it let you take a screenshot of the artifacts? If so, the graphics card is actually rendering that. Posting here might help determine the issue.

I'd start with a clean install of your graphics drivers, pulling the newest version.

Click to expand...

I was too confused/shocked at the time to think "maybe I should screencap it"... Im going to reinstall the drivers once memtest is done here, though.

Badbonji said:

How big were these artifacts? I'd try reseating the video cable and potentially trying another one just in case that's the issue, I've had artifacts from a slightly loose DVI cable before. I'm guessing a screenshot could help.

Click to expand...

The artifacts were about 2 inches wide(i have a 34 inch monitor). I couldnt recreate the artifacts even with furmark... Its a good and bad thing I guess. I'll try messing with my cables to see if that does anything.

Some of the older versions of firefox had issues with video playback on specific cards - make sure you're using a recent version.