NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 - Screen Tearing and Artifacting Issues

So, I picked up a new GPU today and had some buddies help me get it installed. Once I got home, I made sure to wipe all my old drivers completely before installing the new ones. Everything seemed perfect at first—I fired up a game and it was running exactly how it should. But then, after about an hour of play, the screen tearing/flickering started out of nowhere... just little blocks popping up everywhere.
I’ve tried pretty much everything to fix this. I read online that some people have issues with the 1000 series, and apparently, some folks fixed it by tweaking their monitor's refresh rate (either bumping it up or down) or changing the resolution. Others found success toggling V-Sync on or off. I even saw some mentions of users on Windows 7 enabling Windows Aero to solve it, but nothing has worked for me so far. I've gone through every trick in the book, and I'm currently running the latest drivers listed above. :/

If anyone happens to think of something else or has any other solutions we could test out, please let me know. I really don't think there's anything wrong with the card itself; it performed beautifully right out of the gate, and everything works perfectly except for this one annoying issue.

Both NVIDIA and Intel drivers have been pretty hit-or-miss over the last eight months; I’ve seen plenty of complaints online. You might want to try rolling back to some drivers from July instead.

Secondly—you can't really blame the graphics card for screen tearing. It’s actually an issue within the games themselves. Some titles suffer from it more than others, which is why there are specific settings like VSync, or specialized monitors like FreeSync and G-Sync, to handle it.

As for those artifacts (the little blocks appearing on screen), you shouldn't be seeing them unless it's a driver issue—assuming you've tested a few different versions. If they pop up in every single game you play, then you're likely looking at a hardware failure. But again, it's entirely possible that certain drivers just don't play nice with a specific game. If the games have any recent patches available, try installing those too.

Raymond Anderson14

http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/...-download.html

I'd suggest using this tool to wipe out your old drivers first—it’s possible some leftover files from your previous graphics card are still hanging around in the registry and causing all this trouble? This program basically scrubs everything clean, including those pesky remnants... Once you're done, just give your PC a quick restart and then go ahead with a fresh driver installation.

I noticed something. You said you installed the card and then went to wipe the old drivers—that might be where things went sideways.

Ideally, you should’ve cleared out the old drivers first, shut down the PC, swapped the cards, and then handled the new drivers. Usually, that works fine, at least based on my limited experience.

You know how this ends. You'll end up with a fresh Windows install anyway...😁
To save us all the headache of cleaning files, reinstalling drivers, and whatever else... it always just ends with a total format and a clean Windows setup.
Well, if it doesn't work after that, it's not going to work.😁

Thanks for all the help, everyone. It turns out the issue was actually with the graphics card itself. I had it swapped out, and everything is running perfectly now with the latest drivers installed! 🙂

P.S. If you're looking for an upgrade, I can't recommend the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 - Screen Tearing 6GB version enough—you won't regret it!