What is artifacting?
 

I've seen this term used a lot in discussions about overclocking your video card, what exactly is it? I've probably encountered it and just dont know that thats what its called.

An artifact, boradly defined, is any sort of glitch of "fuzzy spot" in a video image. When video cards get OC'd to a high enough point, their stability starts dropping and they don't reproduce the scenes in a game as reliably as they should. THis results in small irregularities, such as a dark spot randomly appearing on a wall in a game, etc.

Basically when you see something that really shouldn't be there.

a glitch in the matrix?

\boo's my self

Artifacts typically show up when geometry stops displaying correctly, inconsistently, etc.

Textures are also affected. They'll do a number of odd things like displaying the wrong color, flickering, or even not showing up at all.

Basically, if something looks wrong and its because of a hardware issue (ie, overclocking) you've got artifacts.

edit: can also be cause be corrupt, bad, or incompatible drivers.

And is frequently caused by the use of Real Player ;)

Artifacts are usually caused by a corrupted frame buffer, which can have various causes.

Artifacts are usually referring to bits on the display that are leftover from something that was previously displayed, hence the term.