Reading you guys' experience with it makes me glad I shifted to the green side again. AMD and their drivers are just a pain in the ass most of the times. And I'm sorry to say it, but that's just it.
What I do is I go into Programs & Features, right click "AMD Catalyst Installation Manager", and click "Change". That brings up a menu where you can select to install or uninstall AMD drivers and software, or express uninstall ALL AMD drivers and software. I just do the express uninstall, restart my PC, then install the new drivers. Basically a clean install, and it's fairly straightforward. I will note however that I've seen the express option uninstall AMD
chipset drivers as well, along with things like USB drivers, when I tried doing it on a friend's AMD-based laptop. It's not a concern for an Intel user, but AMD CPU users should avoid the express option and directly pick what software they want to uninstall.
It is not forced, but unlike Nvidia, AMD has yet to learn about "clean installs", so unless you manually uninstall their previous driver, parts you choose not to install in the new ones are not removed. And it wouldn't be so bad if it didn't spam you with nonsense. I don't care if I am level 3 in some bullcrap designed for people not smart enough to set their own settings.
Oh well, tonight I get to uninstall / reinstall everything to my new SSDs.
Actually, the "AMD Gaming App" isn't listed when you uninstall drivers through the utility I just described above. It's installed as its own separate app, and shows up as "Raptr" in Programs and Features. Presumably you can uninstall it completely separate from the rest of AMD's drivers.
On topic, I like Catalyst Control Center just fine. I don't overvolt, so Catalyst's overclocking controls work without the need for a third party utility (I only switch on MSI Afterburner when I feel like recording a gameplay video, which is rare). They introduced individual, user-modifiable graphics profiles for applications a year or two back, so that's good for doing things like forcing antialiasing or tweaking the texture filtering. There's also things like display color balance and global video color options; I've rarely touched those but they seem useful if you're picky about those things. My only complaint about the CCC is that I've seen it take a while for the window to appear after clicking on the icon in the taskbar, but it appeared pretty instantaneously just now when I clicked it so perhaps AMD has cut away some of the bloat.
Ultimately just about everything the CCC does and more can be done by third party utilities such as Afterburner. I think the question can be rephrased as "Do I need more than one graphics utility running at the same time?", to which the answer is no. If I were in your position I'd remove it if you were to start using Afterburner, if for no reason than to keep it from cluttering things. Always good to trim off unneeded applications from your PC.
