Why does ATI hate my LCD? Refresh rates and resolutions problems.

[viivo]

I use my 1080P Sony Bravia HDTV as my main PC monitor. I recently did a sidegrade from an 8800GTX to a 4850 (with a clean Win7 x64 install beforehand) and am having a few problems. The 4850 is connected using the DVI-HDMI adapter and I am also using the Radeon's onboard audio.

First, while I can play most games at 1920x1080 fairly well, a few like Splinter Cell Conviction require me to drop down to 1280x720. On my 8800 things still looked great at 720P; sharp and crisp with few jaggies. However on the 4850 it's a mess. Blurry, jaggy, almost looks like I'm running in a widescreen 480P. There is a definite, discernible difference between the two and I don't know why.

Second, my refresh rates and over/underscan are all over the place. Every time I install new drivers I have to go in and put overscan to 0% and restart twice or my games will have horizontal and vertical black borders. As well, while before I only had a choice between 24 and 60Hz, now there's two 60HZ options, and three 59HZ options, one of which is italicized in the options. If I choose one of the 60HZ options, everything blurs and stretches and there are black borders, even after setting overscan. The second 60 looks good for 1080, but complete garbage for 720. The three 59s are like the first 60; blurry, stretched, borders. Why can't I have a nice looking 720P like I did on my 8800?

Also, I can't seem to use resolutions other than 1920x1080 and 1280x720 - if I try to add a custom one (like 1600x900) the scaling options all become grayed out and I can't adjust the overscan, thus I'm stuck with horizontal and vertical borders. Again, I had no trouble doing this on the Nvidia. I only have a couple scaling options on the TV itself: Wide Zoom, Normal, Full and Zoom. They either cut off the screen or don't zoom in enough. I can find no other options anywhere in the TV's manual or the options menus.

What I'm asking is if there's some fix out there that will allow me to use 1280x720 at the TV's maximum refresh rate because I think that's what's happening - it's reverting to something like 24 or 30HZ.

Operating system:
Windows 7 x64, updated, no viruses/trojans.

System specs:
Intel C2D e7200 at 3.2GHz
4GB Gskill DDR2 at 1GHz
XFX HD4850 512MB 256-bit. Not overclocked presently, never goes above 50C under full load.
Gigabyte P35-DS3L
Corsair HX-520 PSU

Overclocks are prime stable. Nothing overheats.

 

[superccs]

Classic nvidia to ATi driver residue issue I think. Get an app called Driver Sweeper which will completely remove all references to either of the manufacture's drivers, after that goes and does its thing... keep uninstalling the windows installed drivers until you can get it to run as a plug n play VGA adapter, or similar.

Then you can finally install the latest Catalyst drivers.

That should help, I did almost the same GPU swap about 3 months ago and it drove me nutz.

Good luck.

 

[repoman0]

^"Clean win 7 install beforehand"

 

[Qbah]

For the refresh rate, go to CCC and add a custom HDTV resolution 1080p60. I was having the same problem when playing on my HDTV - every time I started a fullscreen game on it, the TV switched to 24hz. Adding this fixed the problem for the most part. But what a pain it was before finding out the solution...

As for scaling, sorry, no idea. My card fills out the screen almost perfectly (5mm black bars on each side perhaps). I set my HDTV to 1080p at 60Hz in CCC. Though I'm pretty sure the setting sticks for scaling. So just set it to stretch but keep aspect ratio (or however you want it) and even if it's grayed out at a different resolution, it will behave like you selected earlier (I tested it on few resolutions and it worked fine).

 

[Grooveriding]

I recently got an amazing deal on the sale/purchase of new cards and went from ATI to NV.

I had all kinds of issues after switching the cards, I used driver sweeper, cleaned my registry, wiped old files off the hdd. Everything you could think of to do, and still had a host of issues with the nv cards. SLI did not work properly, the nvidia control panel was broken and none of my settings held in game.

I ended up having to totally reinstall my os :/ But everything works now.

 

[viivo]

For the refresh rate, go to CCC and add a custom HDTV resolution 1080p60. I was having the same problem when playing on my HDTV - every time I started a fullscreen game on it, the TV switched to 24hz. Adding this fixed the problem for the most part. But what a pain it was before finding out the solution...

As for scaling, sorry, no idea. My card fills out the screen almost perfectly (5mm black bars on each side perhaps). I set my HDTV to 1080p at 60Hz in CCC. Though I'm pretty sure the setting sticks for scaling. So just set it to stretch but keep aspect ratio (or however you want it) and even if it's grayed out at a different resolution, it will behave like you selected earlier (I tested it on few resolutions and it worked fine).

It's really strange. I was able to get 1136x648 to work perfectly - my TV's scaling options even had an extra setting, "Full 2" which made it look perfect. However now every time I switch to that res there's a 2 inch border around the whole screen and I can't get that option back on my TV. I'm getting a different card anyway which I hope will hope, which leads to my next question:

Is it worth upgrading from a 4850 to a 5770?

 

[ASTOCADDIDS]

I just crossed from this thread to a thread on Steam forums and what do you know, theres AussieSausage, surely there cant be 2 AussieSausages. I use Stormzzz username on Steam forums. BarnStorm, get it? ok not funny, my bad.