Ugh... Installation of Latest Catalyst Drivers caused a huge performance decrease...

[SaltBoy]

I have an x800pro, along with a AMD 3000+

About two weeks ago, I installed 5.4 Catalyst drivers. After I rebooted and started up my games, I noticed a HUGE performance hit on The Sims 2 and HL2. Before the "upgrade", they were silky smooth. Now, there are noticable drops in framerates (we're talking like 20 FPS lost in the Sims 2) and just general ugliness.

I uninstalled 5.4 and went back to the previous version (5.3?), but the performance hits remained. Is there something that I did to the registry that might have killed the performance? What can I do to bring it back up? Need any more information or specs? HELP! 🙁

 

[Matthias99]

Did you uninstall the old drivers before installing the new ones (like it tells you to, but idiotically does not FORCE you to)?

If not, try Driver Cleaner. You may need to reinstall your chipset drivers and/or DirectX if things really got torqued up.

 

[SaltBoy]

Originally posted by: Matthias99
Did you uninstall the old drivers before installing the new ones (like it tells you to, but idiotically does not FORCE you to)?

If not, try Driver Cleaner. You may need to reinstall your chipset drivers and/or DirectX if things really got torqued up.

I'm pretty sure I uninstalled the previous version first. I'll try out driver cleaner. Thanks!

 

[MonkeyWrench4000]

Alot of people have reported this drop.

These drivers were supposed to "tweak" performance for HL2, but it actually made it horrible for some people. I too took a huge hit, almost 15fps, plus I had many many glitches. I say skip this driver version.

BTW I'm using a 9800pro, but the X series have a few posts of problems too.

I'm currently using the 4.12, and everything is great. Im not sure if an X series will work with a 4.xx

 

[Brian23]

I just did a fresh install of XP and I just installed 5.4s because it was easy to find them on the intarweb. I have a Radeon 9000. Should I uninstall them and get the 5.3s?

 

[Squally Leonharty]

I haven't really noticed anything. I like to play HL2 and it's all silky smooth. <3 But I guess that's just me. The only framedrops that I experience is that sound bug, where it comes into a short loop and the rest freezes for a short while. Fortunately, that only happens at certain places, there's no regularity in time periods or something. xD

But yeah, maybe the next version will be better?

 

[Euripides]

I have no issues with the new drivers. I will do some furhter tests tonight to check.

 

[biostud]

I always seem to run into problems updating my catalyst drivers.

 

[Lonyo]

Do a quick 3D Mark 01 test (yes, I know, but it can be a useful tool), to see if that's really messed up. It could be 2 odd game specific issues, or it could be system wide.
Check you have not got things like AA/AF enabled, er, that's all I can think of atm.

 

[SaltBoy]

Everybody, I did a lot of testing and tweaking over the weekend. It turns out that the problem was interference with my wireless LAN card!

Regardless, I went back to 5.2 and everything is as it should be. Thanks for all the help and suggestions!