I have a Y580 lenovo laptop with a nvidia geforce gtx 660m graphics card, 6GB of ram, 2.3 GHz.

ive been going through the assassins creed series, and until now ive ran into a problem.

When i start the game up, right when i get to the main menu it starts artifacting.. and ive only had this problem with AC3

Like so: http://www.flickr.com/photos/55998247@N04/8433393687/in/photostream

ive tried reinstalling the game, but nope.

Ive updated my graphics card but still nope..

I just got this laptop for christmas, so i doubt it could be the graphics card going bad, because afterall, its not like its overheating because it happens when the game first starts, and nvidia even sponsors assassins creed 3..

Anybody have any idea how to solve this?

For the sake of ease, I would try downloading the Nvidia GeForce Experience and letting it optimize the settings. If it still goes batshit, at least you've narrowed down the culprit to something other than your drivers and settings.

i downloaded that and optimized it for AC3 and its just the same :(

Some other basic suggestions are: try either verifying game files through Steam or plain re installing the game outright, it could be something as basic as one messed up file. Secondly very specifical technical problems/bugs with a single game are best asked on the game's biggest boards namely the games own official boards in this case, not on a general forum like giant bomb, as the likelyhood of anyone having the exact same problem and having a solution is much smaller here.