Driver n00b question

Hi , I have a CF 5870 setup for my m17x That i bought a couple of months ago. So currently, its running on the stock Dell drivers. So far i've been pretty happy with the whole thing until I bought a game called "The witcher" off steam.

So its a 2007 game with good(but not that great) graphics. I attempted to run this game on my brand new m17x on 1900-1200 resolution and i observed that at places, the game stutters and lags(especially in the cities). the AA is turned off amd AF is 2x. Going by what I see on screen, my machine should be able to blow this thing out of the water.

Either the game is really unoptimized.. (In which case, how did guys play it in 2007?) or my drivers are not updated or something.

I see from the Dell site that their latest drivers for the 5870 is on 5-3-2010. That means that I probably have the Dell latest drivers. The other set of drivers are the catalyst drivers. Thats where I have questions

- Are there any issues with updating the drivers to teh catalyst drivers? any warranty issues, or any other issues?

- Are the Catalyst drivers much newer than the Dell drivers?

- Any features in the laptop that will be affected by changing my drivers to non dell?

- If its ok to go for the catalyst drivers and if it actually improves performance, How do i go about doing that?

--- Here's a Cookie for the help

 

Try using application controlled performance, Antialiasing and Anisotropic filtering in Catalyst Command Center and set your preferences solely ingame. Let me know if something improves. Actually the stock drivers should work out for that game.

 

I would turn off crossfire. My guess is that will solve your problems, and your GPUs will be powerful enough to still run it on max settings. Give it a shot.

 

That did the trick! Disabling Crossfire did ease the problems quite a bit. However, This game is still one excellent unoptimized game