first time iv'e ever encountered this before so i don't know what to do about it

A few months ago while playing Zombie Panic source in the middle of the game i was walking down a corridoor doing nothing out of the ordinary and then the game just freezes, sound loops, screen goes nuts and refreshes every so often with text corrupted, lighting and textures messed and the only way to fix was to just leave.

I though this was just because it was a mod and not an actual game so though nothing more of it.

Until today when i was sitting on the roof of the tower in gravel pit when it started to happen, nothing was going on it was empty and then it just bugged on me, as of right now with steam still running it will crash the second the main menu screen loads, music gets stuck on a loop, text turns corrupt and so on. i'll try and get a screen shot of what's going on if i can.

Edit: took me 10 minuets just to join a game and take this, unfotunatly it's starting to look like artifacting.

Ok, I'll start the questioning off here. Have you updated any drivers recently, and what hardware are you running. I ask this because I've had similar problems with my machine (although not running Source games I admit)

Is this happening in other games? if so I would look at the graphics card and its temps etc as a first port of call (is the fan spinning etc)

Verify the game files in steam also.

Using Geforce 8800 GTX not over clocked, updated the drivers a month or so ago.

And thus far the only games this has happened on is TF2 and ZP:S both source games, call of duty, Far Cry 2 and Crysis wars are all fine though iv'e only been playing FC2

I would verify the game cache files then and use an nvidia driver that is not one of the 180 series.

175.31 , 177.89 and 177.92 seem the most stable for source games. Lots of people are getting this happening to them at the moment mate, not just you.

You could try a driver rollback from device manager, but tbh you'd be better off uninstalling your current driver, running Driver Cleaner (download form www.guru3d.com ) and then installing your previous (or trying any of the above) drivers.


Don't think its likely heat related or hardware fault related if its only source.

FYI I got this same problem after installing Left4Dead and updating gfx drivers about a month or so ago .

I had that problem few times with 178 (?)*, upgraded to 180, now I get stuttering.

*Reboot and verifying game files solved it temporarily for me...got it maybe once a week doing that.