Today I fired up Skyrim as I have most days this week and found a huge graphical disaster. All textures were flat and flashing. I restarted the game and it was fine at first but soon deteriorated to more flashing and missing textures, weird colours, and horrible breakdowns of pink lines...basically graphical crash.

I fired up New Vegas and same thing. New Vegas crashed after about 10 seconds because the display driver stopped working and "successfully recovered" as Windows tells me.

These problems have occurred overnight.

I checked and found there was a new graphics card driver available for my gtx 460 and installed it. No difference whatsoever. I suddenly cannot play games.

Can anyone tell me what I'm supposed to do? Is my card dead or something? I don't understand.

You simply haven't told anyone close to enough information to make any kind of guess, sorry.

Have you tried reinstalling the new drivers? That's where I'd start. Make sure you do a clean install; with Nvidia cards, you do this by selecting Custom setup in the installer and then checking the box to perform a clean install. This will remove any old driver versions you may have installed on your machine and then install the latest version.

If that doesn't work, then yes, i'd suspect a hardware problem. But more information would be helpful.

Thank you! I hauled the GPU out and gave it a dusting. Wasn't too dirty but I cleaned it up anyway. Reseated it, rolled back my driver to the previous one with the intent to do a clean install of the NEW driver I downloaded today in an effort to fix this problem, because aye, I simply installed overtop rather than a clean install.

Anyway, I DID NOT install the new driver again. I tried New Vegas and it was fine and I tried Skryim and I'm still playing it with no issues... so I'm not sure what happened there because this is the driver I was using when I first noticed the problem. *shrug*

Hopefully it'll hold for the next little while. I'm getting a new PC soon anyway so if there was ever a "good" time for the GPU to die now would be it.

Alright, back to enchantment skill grinding for my no death run! Thanks again.