PCTech Forums

Hey, I just got my copy of Doom 3. Yeah, I'm stoked about it myself. Anywho, I have an ATI card and its worked out great for me. Except for the small fact that on some games there are white, tiny dots that keep flickering around randomly. And the more I play, the more they appear. Well, it didn't really bug me in some games, but Doom 3 it bugs the hell out of me.

Anywho, the games it does this white dot thing that I've seen are Far Cry, Splinter Cell, Halo, and Doom 3. It doesn't do this for many of my games such as Vice City, Max Payne 2, The Suffering (etc). And before anyone gives me the "your card isn't powerful enough to run it" stuff, I'm pretty sure it is. My friend has the same card and didn't have this problem.

THIS CARD IS AN ASUS RADEON 9800 XT

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

PS: Yes, the drivers are up to date. So are my chipset drivers. I was thinking maybe it was a RAM problem but I don't know. My ram is Corsair XMS 3200 1 gigabyte if that's any help.

My first two guesses would be that you have a heat related issue, which can easily be troubleshot by taking off the side pannel, checking the fan on the video card to make sure it's running, and not full of dust (if you clean it with canned air, make sure you HOLD THE FAN STILL) the high velocity air will spin fans faster than they are designed to spin and ruin their bearings)

Once the heatsink is clean, you may see an improvement... if it wasn't dirty try taking a normal, house fan, and pointing it directly at your card for some major extra cooling.

if you still get dots with the big house fan, i'd probably be talking to ATI's support over a possible defective card.

also depending on how good of a friend you've got (the one who has the same card) You could try to either take the card to his house and see if it does the same thing in his pc, or have him bring his card over to see if it malfuntions in your pc.

Good luck

The other possible problem is that it's a glitch in the drive which will be ironed out soon - with such a new game, there will always be a patch coming along soon to cope with newly discovered issues as it hits the mass market

This is an issue with the Radeon 9x00 cards.. my 9800 Pro AIW does exactly the same thing..

I haven't got round to sorting my problem yet.. but there are drivers in production by ATI.. (currently in Beta release) that address this very problem.

Your other option is to try rolling back to the most recent WHQL certified catalyst driver set.. and see if that makes any difference..

good luck

i have an ati card myself and did have a heat problem with it. What i did with mine is to buy a back plate and then twist it 90 degrees and super glue it to the the top of an 80mm fan and then screw it in the same place as the ati card what this then does is blows cool air across the top and bottom of it and it works a treat i recommend it to anyone. Not saying it'll work for everyone but its worth a try.