Driver Update Causes More Issue?

[lucky_luk3]

Hi all,

I have a 4870X2 GPU and the card has been running on Catalyst Version 10.10 (Oct 2010) along with its associated drivers. The driver has been running pretty well, until I changed my default 19" ACER LCD Monitor to a 22" Samsung Syncmaster 226BW LCD Monitor. After the change, I began to see minor graphical problems. Some in-game texts showed some lines at the end of the sentence. Even the FPS counter produced similar lines at the end of the numbers. This issue did not happen when I was still using the Acer monitor.

I have decided to change to Catalyst Version 11.2 (Feb 2011) which is the latest update by far. I completely uninstall previous Catalyst driver and its associated applications (CCC), reboot, then install Catalyst 11.2. After another reboot , started the same game, I saw even more graphical issues. There are now flashing polygons at certain places of the game. (I am playing AION). Those polygons are seen on the ground, sky and water.

Does anyone experienced this issue before? Does the latest driver always mean better than its predecessor? Should I revert to my prev driver?

Your advice is much appreciated. Thank you.:)

[saintjimmy]

What about the temps of the card? It may be that the new driver makes the fan run slower when it's set to auto fan control.

However, I do know that other games lost performance on recent driver updates as well. GTA 4 only runs well on ATI drivers 10.7 and older; anything newer and the game is completely unplayable at 1920 x 1080 on my setup in my sig. So I'm sticking with 10.7 until I can either part with the game, or they release an update that improves its performance (although honestly, it's a console port with a horribly unoptimized graphics engine in the first place).

[lucky_luk3]

The temp of the card when running Aion using Catalyst 10.10 is between 60 - 65 deg C, which is quite normal to me. When upgrading to Catalyst 11.2, the idle temp itself is already 50++ deg C as compared to around 40 deg C in 10.10. Idle here means I dont run any apps, simply on desktop page.

However, I dont think card's temperature is associated to the graphical issues I mentioned earlier. For info, I have changed the cable which connects the GPU to the monitor. Initially, it was a standard VGA cable. Now, I am using a DVI cable. I have tried playing other games like Mass Effect 2 and that game does not display the same graphical issue mentioned in my trailing message. I have even changed to the other DVI port on my card (4870 X2 has 2 DVI ports) and the extra lines after the in-game wordings remain there.

Anyone with kind advice would be much appreciated. Thank you. :)

[em3e3]

So the first issue (weird lines) happened after changing the monitors. Did you change resolution as well? I think you might have a card that is going south.

[ultima]

go back to 10.10 drivers see if the issues go away