red checkerboard effect in certain areas : /

[norseman]

I have a 9800xt 256mb, latest drivers
1gig ram
audigy 2 latest drivers
P4 2.4ghz

I cannot seem to get rid of these red dots that makeup a checkerboard. This only happends in certain areas that are wet I think, maybe... not sure. Check em out:

http://home.comcast.net/~barbaricbob/prey1.jpg (without)
http://home.comcast.net/~barbaricbob/prey2.jpg (with)

[TerminX]

That looks like your video card is artifacting. This can be a side-effect of overheating, hardware damage, et cetera, but I seem to recall that people with otherwise functional ATI cards were having this problem with Doom 3 when it came out. You might try renaming prey.exe to doom3.exe (or possibly quake4.exe) in order to see if perhaps there's a workaround for the issue built into the driver.

[norseman]

yeah.. my video card hangs around 80-85 degrees farenheit. I have no idea how to get it to cool off. I have an open case, with a fan blowin right on top of the vid card.

[norseman]

Allright. So I took apart the fan from my Radeon9800XT. I discovvered dust was clogged into the air pathways that needed to be free, and that it was lacking thermal gloo on the GPU.

There was also dust balls sitting near my CPU after I took its heatsink off. After I cleaned it all up, and reapplied thermal glue. I put it all back together, and stuck a home fan in front of the open case.

Now my GPU is running at ~70 degrees as opposed to 85+.

Prey runs perfeclty now, without artifacts. All fixed.

[TerminX]

Excellent. Good to see that you've solved your problem!