Catalyst Control Center update ruined frame rates

I recently reinstalled windows so as to be able to cleanly install FSX SE. This meant that I was left with non-updated drivers for my AMD Radeon 7700M dedicated graphics card. (I am running FSX on a laptop). I realize the fact that I have an ATI graphics card and that my system is a laptop are not ideal for FSX in the first place, but prior to updating my ATI driver to CCC version 14.4 I was getting good framerates, even with many of the usual addons and light bloom and everything. However since the update the frames per second are appallingly bad. I would prefer to keep the up-to-date driver and teach it to play nicely with FSX, as I also want to run other games on my computer. Has anyone else ever experienced this?

Hi Boris1175,

I still use my old Radeon 6950 vid card in my "new" system. For me, I find that I still get my best FSX results with a much older AMD driver (sorry, I don't remember offhand which version - not at my FSX computer right now). Even when I first built the new system and switched to Win 8, I still installed the old, known AMD vid driver. I do not update my vid driver - on my old system, I let it do an auto-update once, and had issues with FSX - black (not blue) screens, messages that said something about the vid driver crashing and has recovered - not fun to occur in the middle of a friggin' flight or on approach/landing... :mad:

And even after quite a few months with this old driver, I still don't have any issues with any of the other games I play (the Crysis series, Far cry series, Alien Isolation, etc.), but as always, YMMV.

My guess, based on my experience, although others may chime in, which I always welcome, is that unless you "need" that new vid driver version for certain games or effects, you might not need to install it. Re-install the last driver version that worked (I always keep a copy of it - just in case) and run with it.

 

Hope this helps,

 

E-Buzz :pilot:

I have the latest AMD driver installed and have no real frame rate problems. I only ever get bogged down from too many AI in the area if I have excessive traffic settings.

 

The most recent AMD driver installer changed how it installs the graphics driver. This may have caused an problem on your system. I would suggest doing a "clean boot" procedure and re-installing the driver in this mode. Clean boot will ensure nothing can interefere with the instalation process.

 

best of luck.

Have you cleared/deleted the FSX shader cache since you upgraded your video drivers?

 

Here's a good tutorial.

 

https://fsxtimes.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/clean-up-shader-cache/

Would P3D perhaps work better with current drivers?

I'm using Catalyst 14.4 with a Radeon 7670 and it works fine with FSX, at least no frame rate drop compared to previous version. I'm using the driver version downloaded from AMD site, but never tried the one coming from Windows update (8.1).

 

Envoyé de mon K01H en utilisant Tapatalk

I always recommend that if you are doing a AMD driver update do it from the AMD site not from windows. Try reinstalling the driver from the AMD site, you will find that you will have your problems sorted.

Thanks for the tip darryl737! ;)

I've been very reluctant to use the latest AMD drivers due to what I described previously. I'll give it a shot this weekend :cool:

 

E-Buzz :pilot:

I cleaned out the shader cache folders and that cleaned it right up! I am very pleased. Thank you all!

Hi Boris1175,

Thank you for following up with an update.

I'm glad you were able to get things sorted out!

 

And thanks to ftldave for the shader cache tip!

 

E-Buzz :pilot: