Is this Graphics Card failure?

[thespr]

My card is like .. 3+ years old. It's an old 660ti and ****.
Anyways lately I've been having weird *** game stuttering in League of Legends and the game would freeze randomly but I still heard up-to-date sounds.
Fast forward a week to just now in my last game.
I'm in the middle of a fight and all of the terrain just turns black and I can clearly see polygon shaped **** and my character starts stuttering in the black mess of a team fight and then it fixes itself and I snap like 20ft from where I was and I'm dead.
I've heard that games with massive stuttering and discoloration like this means GPU failure but I want to be 100% certain before buying a new one. I tried screenshotting it but it only screenshotted a pure black screen (while I was in the teamfight).
Currently on an i5-3570k and the 660ti.
Edit: Should also mention I just put 2 new 4GB sticks of RAM in my PC .. not sure if that'd cause THAT but this, to me, looks more like GPU failure.
Edit 2: If I need to buy a new GPU, would a 970 or a R9 290 work with this motherboard? GIGABYTE GA-B75M-D3H

 

[carnageX]

Have you updated drivers from nVidia's site?

What are your GPU temps while in-game, and when this starts happening?

 

[thespr]

Have you updated drivers from nVidia's site?

What are your GPU temps while in-game, and when this starts happening?

I checked and it says ~39 celsius but I felt the card and it wasn't hot to the touch or anything like that, it felt fine externally. My CPU also said ~35 celsius.

 

[PP Mguire]

Those are idle temps, need load temps.

 

[thespr]

Those are idle temps, need load temps.

I was in-game when I opened speed fan if that's what you're asking. Wasn't just chilling at the desktop or something.

Found this post on Reddit today. My bug is similar to this although the entire terrain turns black/pixelated like this **** and in the thread the top vote is that his GPU is failing would you say after seeing this example you'd agree?:

 

[cb600fshornet]

That does sound quite low, but my GTX650Ti idles at about 27 and I've never seen it exceed 45 under load oddly enough.

First port of call should be to wipe the drivers using a third party software ("DriverSweeper" or its successor "Display Driver Uninstaller") and install the latest available (stable) drivers from Nvidia for your card.

 

[carnageX]

I was in-game when I opened speed fan if that's what you're asking. Wasn't just chilling at the desktop or something.

Found this post on Reddit today. My bug is similar to this although the entire terrain turns black/pixelated like this **** and in the thread the top vote is that his GPU is failing would you say after seeing this example you'd agree?:

Use HWMonitor, not Speedfan. Speedfan isn't necessarily always accurate.

Did you try updating your drivers like I suggested?

 

[thespr]

Use HWMonitor, not Speedfan. Speedfan isn't necessarily always accurate.

Did you try updating your drivers like I suggested?

Back when I originally had this issue I updated my drivers and it seemed to have made it worse. This was ~3 days ago.

 

[cb600fshornet]

Back when I originally had this issue I updated my drivers and it seemed to have made it worse. This was ~3 days ago.

Did you run a program that completely wiped the old drivers while the PC was booted in safe mode before you installed the new drivers?

 

[thespr]

Did you run a program that completely wiped the old drivers while the PC was booted in safe mode before you installed the new drivers?

No, I just manually uninstalled the Graphics Driver and reinstalled the drivers.