Random screen glitches

[Owltoid]

I'm sorry for the poor description, but I'm not sure how to detail the problem I'm having. Every once in awhile, my WoW will start flickering in small parts of the screen, almost showing little gray areas. It will continue randomly flickering (different parts of the window) until I restart WoW. Reloading the console will not fix the problem.

My screen setup (all on one monitor, my TV):

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Usually this problem start occuring when I switch my main window, such as:

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I cannot recreate the problem, and it doesn't happen all the time. I have tried turning down the video settings, but every once in awhile this still happens. Usually I'm in Dalaran or WG, so I know the video card is getting hammered, but for the most part everything runs smooth (25-40 FPS in Dalaran on main, 8 FPS on background).

My setup:
GTX 275 w/ 1.8GB
i7 920
SSD
12 GB RAM

[Marious]

I feel your pain happens to me all the time, I can not set my main to max settings in Dal at all and have any of my drones on regardless of where there at Dal or some where else the issue still persist. Not sure what causes it other than the lag and video being too high, I dont really bring my drones into the city with me which kind of sucks since I cant go to the badge vendor and get stuff all at the same time. I can have a max of 2 in Dal at one time.

Sorry I dont got a solutions for you, just thought I let you know your not the only one with the issue.

[Owltoid]

I'm not sure what causes the issue. The only time when my computer lags is at the end of a WG battle, and I'm not convinced it isn't server lag. Everything is great in Dalaran most of the time, but then I'll do a PiP switch to one of my slaves and the problem will start occuring. Almost like there's some sort of leak. Is it possible my video card is deffective in some way (bad RAM)?

[Marious]

It is quite possible that your card is actually over heating, do you have SLI on there? Could be that you need one of them little fans that go by your card and blow out so you get rid of more heat. My place is really hot and we got a cat so I probably dont give the computer lots of room to breath, I even had an issue with my ram where it actually broke one of the modules and when I looked at it, it seemed as if it was heat damage of some sort.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

This is almost guaranteed to be a graphics hardware or driver problem. My ATI machines used to do it all the time. My updated NVidia 8800 series cards don't do this except on one machine, and that one only if I try to load 4+ WoWs. Basically, what appears to be happening is that the z-buffering is suffering some calculation problems and possibly some of the multi-pass texture engine is having the same trouble. You can probably drastically cut down on the artifacting by disabling "Specular Lighting," "Full-Screen Glow Effect," "Projected Textures" and setting the sliders to "low" for stuff like Terrain blending, Shadow quality, Texture filtering and Texture Resolution.

The big two are Projected Textures and Specular Lighting as those add a lot of extra passes to the rendering.

See if that helps.