Artifacts or Display Issue

Either my card, an AMD 6870HD by XFX, or the display drivers are starting to act very oddly. To being with, I recently upgraded to Windows 8. I installed the AMD 12.10 drivers and was generally pleased with the experience. I did notice though that when I launched a game, say Borderlands 2, I had a weird display issue where the screen would be stretched beyond the monitor and would have an odd, almost inverted, color palate with lines running up and down across the whole screen; it looked similar to a failed GPU OC. However, when I changed the resolution of the game to the monitor's native resolution 1920x1080, the screen would be normal. Note that the display size would default to 1400x800 (or something close to that) and I would have to switch it higher.

I didn't think much of this oddity at the time and chalked it up to keeping my games installed through an OS install. Yesterday I went to play Civ 5 and had a whole new experience. It seems as if Civ 5 had a patch to optimize for Windows 8, I gladly selected that option and was confronted with the same screen problem. When I switched the resolution, it didn't go back to proper display. However, if I turned off fullscreen it would display fine regardless of resolution size. When I exited the game and selected the former DX10/11 option, I had the same problem.

Trying to troubleshoot the issue, I went into CCC to see if I can tweak any settings. Given that the screen was displaying as stretched I switched on GPU scaling. This caused my whole display to have the stretched, failed OC type screen. At this point I assumed it was a driver issue, uninstalled all AMD drivers, removed the rest with Driver Fusion and reinstalled the 12.10 drivers (the ones I downloaded from the manufacturer, XFX). Same problem as before, I tried a fresh install of amd.com's 12.10, same problem. I even tried the 12.11 beta drivers, but it's the same problem.

I can temporarily fix the problem by uninstalling all video drivers and reinstalling them. Most of my games need the resolution reset to the higher resolution after the "fix" but they work. Civ 5 still doesn't, and neither can I change any settings in CCC.

My GPU is not overclocked and the only time I ever even used Afterburner was to set a fan profile. I have also reverted my system OC to stock to download and install a set of drivers, but that didn't help either.

Does OCN have any ideas?

Thanks for the suggestion, but, through CCC, I lowered it from the stock of 900 to the minimum of 775 and the issue was still there.

So I installed W7, and the same problem occurred. It had a different look, it looked pixelated; but the same triggers made it happen. I also discovered that I don't know how to purge a W7 install short of a format.

HDMI

Interesting, with a DVI-D cable, I don't have the problem. It's only over HDMI. For now, I'll just switch over as I don't need the audio capability.