Is something wrong with my HD 4850

Question

I use to have a Geforce 5200 fx and I never had any problems other than it ran slow on most games but on my HIS HD 4850, I have more problems than my old Nvidia card. I hate the stupid driver, Nvidia's driver was alot better. Every game I run has to have the same settings on my driver unlike Nvidia's where I can choose a game exe and each have their settings. The card could be better if the driver was better. For some reason I lost performance in Test Drive Unlimited and tried every setting in the CCC, I used to have 60 to 80fps in TDU, now I get 35 to 60 fps no matter what settings and I tried to reinstall the ccc 8.7 driver, I tried the driver disk that came with hd 4850 but no luck, it still had the same problem. Has anyone experience this because is it my video card, the driver or the game itself because my other games still runs fine. Maybe I shouldn't have left Nvidia and got the 9800 GTX because at least it's more user friendly and has better support for older games.

Answer 1

You will find the 4850 to be a spectacular performance beast once it's happy and set up properly.  If the performance is the same as the old crappy 5200 FX, than there's definitely some major problem.

The most likely problem is that the old Nvidia drivers have not been completely uninstalled, and are causing performance issues.  Make sure that all your old Nvidia drivers are gone by uninstalling them in the control panel, Add/Remove programs.  Then, run this http://downloads.guru3d.com/Guru3D---Dri...  and delete all Nvidia video drivers.  Make sure to only delete VIDEO drivers, and not chipset drivers or others (if you have them).

If that doesn't work, than I would suggest reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling a fresh copy of windows. That will guarantee that there are no driver file conflicts.  I recommend this usually anyway, when going from Nvidia to ATI or vice versa, but it can be a pain in the rear.

The ATI drivers are just fine (I find them as good or even better than the Nvidia ones in fact, and I have used both).  Things are just done a bit differently on the Red Team.  Different driver settings on ATI cards is done through Catalyst Profiles, which can be activated through hotkeys, desktop shortcuts that open the game, etc.  Look under profiles here, about halfway down the page http://www.tweakguides.com/ATICAT_6.html  to learn how to use this feature.  

To get better acquainted with how Catalyst Control Centre works, read the entire guide here http://www.tweakguides.com/ATICAT_1.html

Hope that helps!