reinstalled Skyrim a few days ago and have been played 2-3 times since then. never noticed any issues until today. during the day (game-time), in Whiterun, artifacts filled my entire screen when looking in one particular direction. I realized they were coming off of one specific npc, the Battle-Born kid. when he went into a house, they disappeared. I shut down the game to search the interwebs for information, then thought I'd start it up again to get a screenshot. but this time, the issue did not present itself. not even after reloading a save just before I last saw the glitch.

I put a lot of hours into Skyrim before, back when I had a GTX 260, and never had any issues then. I now have a Radeon HD7850 (sapphire's overclocked version) with the latest drivers. I have no issues in any other games, and today was the first I noticed anything in Skyrim. I have, however, noticed some weird glitches in Windows 7 since I switched cards. graphics drivers sometimes crash when the pc goes to sleep, and when watching videos in firefox (ie youtube) or in media player when firefox is open, the screen might jump up and down a few pixels for just a second or two. it really odd, never seen anything like it.

can this simply be bad drivers? any other ideas? what I'm thinking, if the card itself was bad, I'd have issues in games like Diablo 3 and Modern Warfare 3 as well, or could the problem show itself only in certain games?