For a couple of months now my Radeon HD 7950 has been giving me random black screen crashes without any warning. Sometimes it takes minutes, sometimes hours. I've updated the AMD drivers but it keeps happening. Does anyone know what it could be? Is the card dying or is it a software issue?
I had something similar with an old graphics card back then, and it turned out to be the VRAM degrading, but what saved me was putting the card in the fridge for a bit before using it (yeah, sounds weird but it works temporarily).
Anyway, if it's already that old and your drivers are up to date, it's probably a physical failure in the capacitors or the memory itself. Try lowering your room temperature, point a fan directly at the tower, or if you've got another old graphics card lying around, test with that to rule out it being a PCI slot problem.
An HD 7950 from that era is usually pushing the 10+ year mark, so it's most likely a hardware issue: dried capacitors on the PCB or the VRAM starting to fail.
Before you give up on it, try lowering the GPU voltage a bit in AMD's software (Radeon Settings), bringing down the temperature with better ventilation, or cleaning the fans because sometimes dust causes throttling and that triggers black screens. If that doesn't fix it or the card gets really hot, it's probably time to replace it.
Don't download drivers from sketchy websites or install "modified" versions, that usually makes everything worse. What nobody mentioned: before you assume the card is dying, check if it's overheating.
An old HD 7950 collects dust like crazy and if the cooler's clogged, it starts throttling and throwing black screens. Open up the case, clean it properly with compressed air and check the temperatures with something like GPU-Z while you're gaming. If the card hits 80+ degrees fast, that's your culprit, not necessarily a hardware failure.
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