Radeon 6950 tessellation artifacts?

In short: I've had my DSO computer for about three months now, and it's been awesome. To be specific, my video card is an XFX HD695XZDDC. Its runs almost all of my games flawlessly and it's quite powerful for my needs.

I've noticed a strange problem though: It displays artifacts, but ONLY in DX11 games with tessellation. There are only two applications where I've seen it happen: Metro 2033, and the Unigine Heaven Benchmark (both use tesselation).

The other weird thing is: The artifacts only last for a few seconds. It starts out really bad, then slowly, gradually lessens and lessens until they're completely gone and the graphics are completely artifact free.

So for example, when I start up Metro 2033, as soon as I get to the menu, artifacts are flying all over the place. I'll click the "load game" button, load the level, and the artifacts are still kinda there but some have gone away. Then a few seconds later and it's completely gone. Does this make sense?

Apparently I'm not the only one who has this problem. Here's a youtube video of a guy with a 6950, running the Heaven benchmark, with terrible artifacting. Now imagine that, but only lasting for a few seconds as soon as the benchmark is started, and slowly dissipating until it's completely gone. After that, I can run the benchmark for as long as I want, with as high settings as I want, completely flawlessly. It's only when I START the benchmark, or when I START Metro 2033 when the problem appears for a few moments.

So what do you guys think? Pretty bizarre, eh? It doesn't bother me a ton, seeing as there's only one actual game I play that uses tessellation (Metro 2033). And even then, it's not a big problem because it only lasts a few seconds anyway before completely disappearing and I can continue playing the game as long as I want with no problems.

It doesn't seem to be a temperature issue. Especially since the problem actually fixes itself during gameplay. I haven't checked my GPU temps lately, but I'm pretty sure it never goes above the 70's on full load.

It MIGHT be a driver problem, but seeing as I've always kept my drivers updated, I somewhat doubt it. It happened with 11.5 (I think), 11.6, and now 11.7. Same issues. Although when I got my new PC back in May and I first tested out Metro 2033 with 11.4, I don't remember any jarring issues... so who knows, maybe it IS driver related and they just haven't fixed it yet.

I decided to take some screenshots of the issue. Here they are in chronological order, starting from the beginning of the benchmark and going to about 30 seconds in.















Here are the last two, took after the artifacts cleared up. It's as if nothing ever happened.





So... I guess this means RMA? :(