Ok....I've been having these problems ever since my Radeon 8500 which I ditched in favor of a GeForce FX5200 on the grounds that the Radeon Catalyst drivers sucked large amounts of ass. After i got my new computer, equipped with a Mobility Radeon 9600, I was wary of the fact that I'd have to return to Catalyst drivers but I'd heard the drivers have gotten just as good as ForceWare/Detonator drivers, and the rest of the computer was an awesome deal so I went with it. First few weeks, it ran fine and I thought ATI got it right by now. Unfortunately no.

Recently I've been getting 3D-based instability issues and errors across the board. After recovering from Direct3D being busted for unknown reasons (I suspect the Catalyst drivers for this too but I'm kinda doubtful it actually did this part of it) I got my 3D games back but instability issues persist. HL2 crashes (and this in itself NEVER happened on my old Detonator/ForceWare FX5200 despite having 1.7 Gigs more of RAM and a CPU speed over twice as fast on this computer) I'm sure my minor Overclocking is not causing it because video artifact tests turn up all green and it crashes in the same way when it's not overclocked. anyway :P. Tribes: Vengeance crashes as well due to a memory error linked to D3D, and DXDiag shows no errors and a reinstallation of DX9.0c has not changed any of the instability issues (and to mention on my old computer DX9.0c ran fine).

I also know the instability is not due to sound issues since i tried running HL2 with my PCMIA Soundcard out of the slot and disabled and the game sound disabled completely and the crash recurs every time. Spyware and virus tests turn up green and the hard drive has been recently defragmented.

Strangest part is, these issues have seemed to pop up in mass without warning or explicable cause after a recent restart of my computer.

Thus,

WTF IS WRONG WITH MY D3D/CATALYST?!?! I WANNA GAME WITHOUT FEAR OF A HEINOUS CRASH LOSING MY PROGRESS AND BEING IRRITATED BY HAVING TO LOAD A SEVERAL HUNDRED MEGABYTE PROGRAM AGAIN AND AGAIN.

I'm hoping a setting can be changed to fix this and I won't have to wait till late November before I can fix this problem where I'm planning to go back into safe territory and getting a GeForce-line videocard and using ForceWare drivers :P

As a minor sidenote, certain images in games now look like shit now too, including the backgrounds in the UT2004 start menu and the menus in Doom 3. These don't cause crashes though so I'm only minimally concerned about those.

sounds like your video card is having a hardware failure. i had an excellent video card a few years back and it worked amazing for 35 days. pixelation would occur, but only on certain objects (like the fish in window's 3D fish screen saver) and in games. after a while it actually got worse and began crashing graphic intensive programs. i never got ahold of the company's support, but by browsing their forums (i stumbled across their forums, their site is setup to piss you off) and i found out that multiple other ppl were having the same issue. and it was hardware failure. -_-; needless to say, i bought a geforce (i forget the number :p but its an evga brand) and everything works fine.

on a side note, my evga card looks very plain, no fan just a heatsink with heatsink gel. i think most video cards are made too "fancy looking" as oppossed to being more functional in durability.

......shit. Well thanks for shedding light on this topic. I browsed the Steam and HL2.net forums and found that almost all the people with the same problem as i did (the topics were 21 and 72 pages long, mostly of different people adding their specs to the list of machines that had the crashing problem) and the great majority of them were using Radeon cards.

Might (but unlikely) have been my OC'ing at one time because i got confused of the GPU and Mem clock speeds when i was tweaking but no other instability or even artifacting appeared.

I'm pretty sure it's what you said, though Sledge. My friend had his Radeon die on him just a month ago and it was similar problems...