Intel 4600 Rainbow Screen of Death and Artifacting.

I have a bit of a weird one.

Sometime ago my old Nvidia GTX560 Ti died. I don't have the ability to replace the card at the moment so I've been using my onboard Intel HD 4600. I must say I'm pretty impressed by what that little GPU on die can do.

Anyway, I'm having some really weird issues.

Currently I'm on driver 10.18.10.3621 Let's call it the New driver. What happens basically is that many games (specifically OpenGL and possibly?? older DX games) have rather severe graphics corruption. Basically textures flicker wildly, sometimes polygons draw at wild angles. It makes me think of some sort of memory corruption.

Also, the FPS can vary wildy, games stutter, etc. Newer games (Dx9+) do not seem to have this issue.

Here is a demo video. Note that it is *far* worse IRL, the recording software is only picking up a small amount of the issues. Games are almost unplayable.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/44266/intel/corruption.mp4

Here is the intel information center details.

Intel(R) HD Graphics 4600

Report Date: Monday, July 28, 2014
Report Time [hh:mm:ss]: 10:53:24 PM
Driver Version: 10.18.10.3621
Default Language: English (Australia)
Installed DirectX* Version: 11.0
Supported DirectX* Version: 11.0
Shader Version: 5.0
OpenGL* Version: 4.2
OpenCL* Version: 1.2
Physical Memory: 7617 MB
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4670K CPU @ 3.40GHz
Processor Speed: 3392 MHz
Vendor ID: 8086
Device ID: 0412
Device Revision: 06

* Processor Graphics Information *

Processor Graphics in Use: Intel(R) HD Graphics 4600
Video BIOS: 2170.0
Current Resolution: 1920 x 1200

* Devices connected to the Graphics Accelerator *

Active Displays: 1

* Monitor *

Display Type: Analog
Serial Number: DELa025
DDC2 Protocol: Supported
Gamma: 2.2
Connector Type: VGA
Device Type: Monitor

Maximum Image Size
Horizontal Size: 20.47 inches
Vertical Size: 12.99 inches

Supported Modes
640 x 480 (60p Hz)
640 x 480 (75p Hz)
720 x 400 (70p Hz)
800 x 600 (60p Hz)
800 x 600 (75p Hz)
1024 x 768 (60p Hz)
1024 x 768 (75p Hz)
1152 x 864 (75p Hz)
1280 x 1024 (75p Hz)
1280 x 1024 (60p Hz)
1600 x 1200 (60p Hz)
1680 x 1050 (60p Hz)
1920 x 1200 (60p Hz)

Power Management Support
Standby Mode: Supported
Suspend Mode: Supported
Active Off Mode: Supported

Raw EDID:
00 FF FF FF FF FF FF 00 10 AC 25 A0 53 4D 55 33
02 12 01 03 0E 34 21 78 EE 9B B5 A9 54 34 AE 25
13 50 54 A5 4B 00 81 80 A9 40 71 4F B3 00 01 01
01 01 01 01 01 01 28 3C 80 A0 70 B0 23 40 30 20
36 00 07 44 21 00 00 1A 00 00 00 FF 00 59 59 32
34 36 38 31 38 33 55 4D 53 20 00 00 00 FC 00 44
45 4C 4C 32 34 30 37 57 46 50 48 43 00 00 00 FD
00 38 4C 1E 53 11 00 0A 20 20 20 20 20 20 00 A4

* Other names and brands are the property of their respective owners.

Click to expand...

I tried to downgrade to the previous version to see if it would help. Version 15.33.18.3496. Let's call it the Old driver. Surprisingly enough, all of those issues disappeared. Games ran perfectly smooth with no artifacting. However sometimes on occasion the graphics driver itself hard crashes. The screen flickers of rainbow colors very rapidly... I've never seen anything even remotely like it. It seems like through google that this "Rainbow screen of death" is an issue of a rather fatal Intel GPU crash. That would seem likely since it has only ever appeared on THIS driver version with THIS GPU.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/44266/intel/RSOD.mp4

So, recap. The new driver is completely stable, but many games, specifically and OpenGL PERHAPS DirectX games suffer from really strange artifacting of sorts.
The old driver is completely fine and stable, but crashes the system.

So I'm forced to use the new driver and really limit what I can play. I'm not sure what direction to go next. I realise I have no left much info but I'm unsure as to what information is required. I do not believe there is any hardware issue otherwise I'd of seen other indications. It is certainly not a heat issue as I have rather effective cooling and I'm in the middle of a rather cold winter. Besides I've monitored the temps.

I'm pretty much stuck on how to improve things right now.

It seams that Nvidia plays nicely with OpenGL only, remember having problems like that even in OpenGL heyday. I think this program can tell you capabilities of your systems OpenGL drivers GPU Caps Viewer: Graphics card and GPU information utility, OpenGL, OpenCL and CUDA API support, NVIDIA GeForce, ATI Radeon | oZone3D.Net

I really doubt the problem is such a bad OpenGL driver for intel. As I've said, games work perfectly fine on the old driver. They look no different to the nvidia 560ti I had, just a bit slower on higher settings. It's just the old driver tends to crash. I don't see intel removing much of the OpenGL caps in a new driver release.. that makes no sense. The HD 4600 is the most advanced Intel integrated GPU you can get, short of the HD 5200 which is for OEM's and the flagship CPU.

Minus these glitches the driver has been rock solid. I'm very impressed considering how intel's drivers used to be.

OpenGL is not very popular any more, it has slipped down now so it would be expected that drivers are not updated with it much.