Weird sudden graphics issues

I'm having issues with my graphics that have suddenly started out of nowhere. A few days ago, for some reason, the graphics suddenly crashed in Windows and got REALLY corrupted on the screen, forcing a restart. I did and things looked fine, but now when I play World of Warcraft, after a while it complains about my addons taking up too much memory and prompting me to disable them. Then the framerates get extremely choppy at times, as well as perhaps the Aero theme of Windows crashing. I have no idea why this is starting all of a sudden, but it doesn't seem like a temperature issue as the fans are going the normal speed and not speeding up. Could it be some sort of memory leak, or worse, a hardware issue? What should I look for?

 

Yeah, according to GPU Temp, the GPU is sitting around 70 Celsius when playing WoW. CPU usage is at 10 percent and Memory is under 700MB. I'm not seeing anything pointing to an issue, really. I just hope it's not a hardware problem...

 

firstly can you post a picture of your screen as there could be lots of reasons.
if its vertical lines down the screen then the card is on the way out.

even with 70c temps which are fine have you cleaned your fans out lately with compressed air.

has to be asked as its happened to the best on here but you have got it set to high performance in power options havnt you.

 

The screen itself looks fine, except for a few days ago when it was completely buggered with no way to do anything. That hasn't happened at all. Now it's doing things like having Aero crash and the like.

I have cleaned out the vent with compressed air, yes. And yes, the power settings are set to High Performance as high as they'll go.

What's strange though as now that I play Kingdoms of Amalur, I'm noticing no issues at all. Strange, I wonder it's specifically WoW in some way...

 

In my experience, graphics card failures can be caused by nothing at all. I'm about exchange my desktop's GTX 580 for the second time in a row because now it's starting to show artifacts and driver crashes after barely a month of use.

 

Very strange. But, now I had gone through a 10-man raid in WoW and didn't experience anything (other than an intense lag spike but that's different). I will keep an eye on it and see if it happens again. Maybe it was just a "phase"...