Flickering black boxes in games since new driver update?

Hello,

Quite recently, I noticed that there were little black box flickering in my games. My GPU is an ATI 4870 HD 512 MB. I did not overclock this GPU. First, it came when I got myself Shogun 2 Total War, and then in all my other games that I played after that.

Here is a pic:



It flickers on for a split second and off and keeps coming back. I did notice though that when I alt-tabbed for a few seconds, and then came back, it took a little while before they came back.

Also, this has nothing to do with heating because the max temp that my GPU will ever hit is 50C and on idle it's 38C with a Accelero heatsink.

I thought this had something to do with the latest 11.6 update I installed, so I uninstalled and driver-sweeped my ATI driver and installed 11.5, but no luck!

Along with that, I noticed that on Youtube, when I went into full screen mode, the screen would be black BUT playing but then flash on and continue the video from where it flashed on. Also, when I got out of the Youtube full screen, the video would be playing but the image on the video would be what I saw before I went into full screen for a few seconds.

I tried reinstalling flash in chrome, but to no avail.

I am on windows 7 64 bit ultimate.

Help please!

Also, to add, I've had a few BSODs when switching in and out of fullscreen in Youtube!

Well, if it started immediately after you installed your new drivers, it's most likely due to that. However, flickering black boxes may indicate a hardware issue. I would run a hardware test and some graphics stress testing before rolling back to a previous driver that worked for you.

I applied the 11.6b hotfix which fixes BSODs, and haven't had a BSOD since... but im still getting the flickering