So is my video card dieing or has my AH game become corrupted?

[Beefcake]

Last night I had some serious issues with Aces High but I'm trying to figure out if it's a corrupt file or if my GFX card is going out.

This is basically what happened, I started Aces High and logged into an arena and about 20 or so seconds after appearing in the tower my entire computer just black screened and restarted. After rebooting with no error messages I started AH and logged back in and managed to fly for about 5 minutes before the game once again black screened and then crashed the whole machine.

At this point I thought maybe my drivers had gone bad so I updated my ATI drivers (To vers 10.12), however, I didn't play AH right away and instead went on to play another game for several hours with no problems.  I then went back to Aces High and flew again for about 5 minutes before my system decided to take LSD. Upon ending flight and entering the tower all of my AH textures looked corrupted  and my screen went nuts. After closing AH my desktop had an odd flickering color problem and I figured my GFX card was shot so I decided to reboot and see what happened.

When the system came back up from rebooting everything appeared fine and I was even able to play a different game for several more hours with no problems what so ever. However, like the bad tester that I am, I didn't check to see if AH would crash again.

I realize this is inconsistent testing but from what I've posted would this seem to sound like a hardware failure or something else? Or is it just to vague?

I'll try and post my dxdiag once I get home. 

[CRYPTIC]

I would delete your vidio8cfg file and then try AH again before anything else. The file is in the setting folder.

[Skuzzy]

Possibly heat related?  It is that time of year.

[Beefcake]

That's what I was thinking Skuzzy but AH doesn't press my machine as much as other games...like Crysis. I tend to keep a close eye on the cards temperature gauge and it never goes into the danger zone.

I have an ATI Radeon HD 4800 and from what I've read the card can easily run at 80-90 celcius with no problems. However, my card idles at about 39 cel and when I'm playing a "heavy" game it maxes out at about 60 cel. Also I have the slightly older version of this case: http://www.xclio.com/products/case-coolbox-adv.htm#details so I have some decent ventilation.

I'd read on the Tech forum that some of the newer ATI drivers were causing problems with AH so I uninstalled the 10.12 drivers and reloaded a fresh batch of 10.9 drivers. I also deleted the vidio8cfg and everything seems to be fine. I played other games last night for 3 hours or so with no problems and I played AH for about 2 hours with 0 problems.

Hopefully this was just a fluke and not the calm before the storm.