I’ve got this annoying issue with my ATI drivers (Catalyst 9.11, but had those issues with the 9.10 and beta drivers as well).
When I launch some applications, or have been running them for a while, the screen just gets messed up. The text gets unreadable, and there are dotted red ang green lines all over the screen. Only solution is to reboot (trying to jump out to shell just locks the computer).
I have noticed that this has only happened (so far) with programs like cedega, crossover games (and wine, but… yeah. you get it), so I guess this occurs at some points when calling the fireglx driver (I’m just gessing over here).
I’m at work now, and can’t provide you with any screenshot (if it’s even possible to take a screenshot of the issue. I will try next time).
Anywas, anyone got any ideas?
Just to clarify things:
The card itself is a Radeon HD 5870.
I saw this thread, but it’s not quiet the same issue.
Now, here’s an image of how it looks like (I forgot to resize)
http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/7112/screenshotdi.png
If I restart X, it still looks like that. Haven’t found anything strange in any logs yet (but I might look in the wrong place). So far, my only solution is to reboot.
The only time i have experienced similar random artifacts similar to the ones in your image was with a bad card… memory chip was breaking down and passing corrupted data.
i hope you get some better advice, but imo the card is bad… or may be getting hot.
the usual thing to do would be to open it up, check that the fan is indeed running… kill the machine, clean the card heatsink etc… start it back up with the case open (so it runs cooler) and see if that has any effect on the problem. I personally don’t know of a diagnostic tool that could be run to evaluate the card, maybe someone else might.
good luck. 
Thanks for your advice, j_xavier.
However, all the fans are running. The card is like a month old, and it runs flawlessly in Windows (with flawlessly I mean maxing out all gfx settings in Left 4 dead 2 and play for hours), and the temperatures seems stable.
What bothers me is that this only happens if wine is running… Even if I just use spotify or mirc.
I still haven’t solved this, but I noticed some new things.
Now, it crashes when I’m using firefox and flash as well, and .xsessions-erros gets spammed with the following:
(npviewer.bin:23088): Gdk-WARNING **: XID collision, trouble ahead
Trying to google this at the moment, and there is a lot of ubuntu threads showing the same issue. Haven’t find any openSuSE compatible solution yet.
Update: installed latest version of flash player from adobe.com to see if it behaves nicer.
It made firefox scroll pager faster, but the main issue is still there. Now I can’t find anything in any log file when this happens.
One interesting thing is that this doesn’t affect the video layer when I watch movies.
A small update on this one.
Changed back to my ‘old’ NVIDIA 8800 ULTRA, and all issues disappeared and has never been seen again. So I guess this was some driver issues with the new Radeon HD 5800 series. Will wait a few driver versions before I try again.
You said earlier that you were using 9.11. Any luck if you install 9.12?
Yes, I tried those as well. Still the same issues. Therefor I still believe that the card is “too new”.
