Death of a Video Card or Bugged New Driver?

[TteFAboB]

Greetings,

After failing to run the "Scarface" game I did as suggested and updated my Vid Card driver to the lastest version. I have an ATI Radeon 9800 with 256mb of memory. My last driver was version 6.9 from Sept. 2006.

Anyway, the problem wasn't with the driver, but with the USB joystick. I've managed to play the game fine. Today, one day later, I'm getting a bizzare "glitch" with any game I run, after managing to run games fine early in the morning. If this could be part of the problem, before installing the new driver I only uninstalled the old driver, I didn't uninstall the old catalyst control center. Could that be a problem, even if yesterday I didn't have any issues at all?

Here's the menu screen from Gal Civ 2, the glitch carries over the entire game, including video cutscenes, and dissapears with the closing of the game. It's actually worse than it looks:



And here's a screenshot of the "3d rendered" world of Scarface. This SS doesn't capture all the yellow flashes and crazyness on the screen. These "blocks" of glitched textures aren't "static" as they appear on a photo. They blink and flash really fast:



So, in summary: everything was working fine. I installed a new driver (for all that matters, without uninstalling the old Catalyst Control Center). Everything remained fine. I turned off the PC. One day later I turned it back on and still didn't have a problem. It was only later in the day, after successfully running the same game without issues, that this "glitch" started to appear. Now any game I run is "glitched". Rebooting, cold-booting, waiting for RAM to clear, nothing prevents the "glitch" from showing up with any game I try to run.

What could it be?

Bad driver? Very likely. It's the only new element.

Bad vid card? Not very likely. My card is old alright but it was working fine untill now.

I'll uninstall everything and download the 6.9 driver to see what happens.