Why is my Sapphire Pure RX 9070 XT flickering in Civ 7?
When rendering massive maps with tons of units, I noticed these periodic white flashes on the screen edges, which became a total nightmare at 4K. The VRAM frequency on my Sapphire Pure Polar RX 9070 XT was bouncing between 2450-2510MHz in default OC mode, causing micro-delays in memory address mapping. I first tried disabling anti-aliasing, which bumped my frames by about 10 FPS, but the flickering didn't budge, leaving me wondering if the drivers were just broken. I eventually used a tuning tool to manually clock the VRAM down to 2400MHz and enabled AMD Anti-Lag. Checking RTSS, the frame time tightened from a messy 16-35ms down to a clean 12-18ms, and the flickering vanished. I actually tried pushing the voltage to 1.15V at first, but the core temp spiked to 88℃ instantly. I had to dial it back and tweak the fan curve to keep it stable at 64-71℃. AIDA64 stress tests now confirm the VRAM is rock steady with frame times locked at 12-18ms.
