Strange graphics bug on Quake II and all Quake III games

[nabelnabel]

Hi everyone -

I recently bought the Quake Pack on steam. I used to have Quake II on a disc, and it ran fine without problems, but I uninstalled that version to install the steam version just because I figured it would be easier not having to worry about the disc. Anyways, now there are these strange vertical lines all over the textures of the game. This happens with Quake II, Quake III, and it also happens with Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which I know is based on the Quake III engine, so I'm assuming it must be an engine problem. When I play Quake 1, everything looks fine. Here is a screenshot for you:
http://i.imgur.com/PFiNS2Q.jpg

Does anyone know what this is exactly, or how to fix it? I turned on v-synch and triple buffering and that did nothing.Thanks so much!

[Spike]

that isn't an engine issue, that looks like a hardware issue. notice how the artifacts are all square and aligned to the screen instead of being sloped with the texture.
vanilla gl quake didn't use multitexturing by default (try gl_texsort 1), but q2 and q3 both do (and modern forks of quake should do also).

updating (or back-dating) your graphics drivers might fix it, replacing/cleaning your gpu's fan might fix it.
using engines that utilise glsl or direct3d apis instead might work around it.

All I can say is that that's no engine bug.

[nabelnabel]

Okay, thanks for the info! My graphics drivers are all up to date. If I wanted to back-date them, how would I do that? I know next to nothing about the technical aspects of computers, so I apologize if I seem ignorant. Does that mean I basically download an earlier version of the driver?

I am planning on building a new computer soon anyway, because the one I'm using now is quite old. I probably won't have to worry about this happening on the new computer, will I?

[Spike]

download some old version
uninstall your current drivers
install the new err old err the ones you just downloaded
hope they don't have an autoupdate...