I was going to say this, too. Whoever took this screenshot needs to get his video card fixed. You know, before it reaches critical mass and goes nuclear.

ive had that exact same thing happen... wish i hearthed while i was swimming south of silithus

Try replicating it.

This is not a photoshop.

If you disagree, first read my comments above.

Definitely Photoshop-doable, but it's not worth the time and effort.

If it is Photoshop, this guy took the painstaking measures of studying how the textures are applied to the models and replicated it with great precision. For instance, take a look at the cloak. The texture is mirrored from left to right, just as cloaks (and tabards, and a multitude of other things) in the game are mapped. The staff is obviously (mostly) a straight front-and-back texture.

Check out the cliffs to his left. The texture is placed just like most cliff textures (and floor, terrain, etc.) are applied; straight from the top. That's why the boxes on the texture are skewed, unlike the perfect squares on the "grass" on the other side of the bridge. Same texture applied there.

All that junk in the air, that's the nether streams or whatever the hell they're called.

And, I mean, he's even got the sun reflection on the grass to his right. I'm a professional graphic designer and use Photoshop almost every day; been using it since version 3. Yes, this could have been done with Photoshop, but it's not worth the effort.

Another thing. It seems that for the world, only terrain objects and the sky objects got the textures replaced. The trees and bridge are still in their original texture. This is important because these objects are loaded into memory differently. These assets are only loaded once, and duplicated around the world (this saves RAM). So it makes sense that their textures are fine; they (static meshes as they're called in UnrealED) are pre-loaded with lighting and texture. The world terrain is loaded and then the texture is applied to it (I'm pretty sure), and the sky objects are most likely unique to this zone (I know that there are nether streams elsewhere, but they're probable unique in shape, so they're not loaded as static assets). This is an amazing detail for a Photoshop artist to think of.

Aside from that, I'm also a computer tech, and I know this isn't completely out of the question. I've seen stranger things happen. My vote is 100% real.

I'd like to add, as well, that I have screenshots of my Troll Hunter with the textures of my Human Rogue in the character select screen.

But IMO, thats a different beast. You are missing colors, wrong patterns loaded, missing data. You dont have an action bar for a face.

I have had a few weird graphical issues myself, and seen others, but they go in a set way(going off of my schooling in programming)
You can get a wrong ground pattern, but your still going to get a ground pattern, or crazy lines, or nothing. You are not going to get Elelks instead of waterfalls, because elleks are not found in the same place as the waterfall animations.

And I have NEVER seen the UI graphics get mixed into ingame stuff.

Because I cant prove its fake, I cant say it is, but Im pretty damn sure its not real to this extent.

Adam,

Could it also be an issue with the graphics card physically overheating?

Actually, I'm not sure how much low-level access the DirectX/OpenGL API provides, so I'm definitely leaning towards it being a poorly coded driver.

It's probably a terrible on-board chipset for VIA or AMD (ATI). Sure, it could also be from Matrox, Intel, or NVIDIA, but I've had more issues with VIA and AMD chipsets than can be imagined.

Possibly...

But this looks like more of a texture swap than a graphical artifact.

Example artifacts on an NVIDIA G80 chipset, most likely from overheating: http://users.tpg.com.au/dancorp/nx8800.jpg

Artifacts, in layman's terms, generally end up being purple textures replacing what would be normal. This often happens for high end graphical effects such as reflections and lighting. For instance, when my 6800GT overheated, the water in Darnassus turned purple/pink and reflective objects did the same. Then blue and purple checkerboards started appearing on random textures.

Aside from that, you have to take into consideration the fact that alt-tab fixed the issue for him. If his card were truly overheating, alt-tabbing would not have solved his problem.

That's a good point, Adam.

I see what you mean. Overheating, in my experience, doesn't affect what appears on the screen to nearly the same extent as horribly misplaced drivers.

I still find it odd, however, that a view as corrupted as the one in the screenshot above was corrected by something as simple as a task switch (alt-tab).