My 3DMark11 scores have dropped by 600 points. Why?

Hello. I posted this in another thread but thought I would start my own thread to see if others are having this same problem.

I recently upgraded my drivers to 13.8 beta 2, and I'm seeing about a 500 to 600 point decrease in 3DMark11 scores. My previous scores were 6600 (using 13.4 drivers) and 7100 (overclocked). Now they are down to about 6000 standard and 6600 overclocked. Any idea what is causing this? Should I just roll back to 13.4 and see if that fixes things? Any ideas?

 

It's most likely driver related .. But also it's not even "that" much of a hit .. So it could correspond to driver related errors just remember to clean install both times when you try to install either driver.

 

Thanks for the response!

When you say "clean install", do you mean simply uninstalling the previous software and installing the new one? I never run a "driver cleaner" or anything, I just do full uninstalls and then install the new stuff. Should I run some sort of driver cleaner? I'm not too familiar with that, so if you have any tips I can use to do that, please let me know. If that's even necessary. Thanks!

Edit - I ran the AMD driver cleaner but it gave me a blue screen and my computer wouldn't start (even in safe mode) until I finally selected "start computer with last previous working settings", and then it was fine. I don't want to possibly screw something up so I'm wary of doing that again. Any ideas?

Edit #2 - Could it be an issue with my power supply? In the past I've had several issues with the power supply. 2 different times I had to unplug my laptop and plug it into a new outlet in order for the power to kick in properly (I was getting 3dmark11 scores in the 2000s). I fixed it both times that happened and it's been good since, but now that I'm seeing a 600 point decrease for no apparent reason (I tried 13.4 again as well as 13.8, same scores with both), I'm thinking I may have another problem here. Thoughts on that? Is there a simple way to test the power supply is functioning properly?

 

Rolled the drivers all the way back to 13.1 and my scores are back up to 7300, overclocked. Sweet!

Am I missing anything by using older drivers? Sucks I had to do that but eh, what can ya do. I'd much rather the better performance over shiny new features any day...

 

So you are playing 3Dmark11? Did you even test some games with new driver, lol...?

 

Clean install meaning using driver sweeper and ccleaner etc etc. the blue screen is common .. The amd tool doesn't work that well :\ .. It sounds like a driver issue because I had similar issues with my 7970m. But worst came to worse I reinstalled windows fresh Installed the drivers and bam if was all working flawlessly.

 

There must of been left overs of 13.1

 

Well, I tested the game (Nehrim mod for Oblivion) and I noticed the slight sluggishness in busy areas, which coincided with my 600 point drop in 3DMark11. Once I got my scores back up to 7300, the game was smoother overall and increased the FPS by a significant amount. Also, Oblivion is so old at this point that I'm sure they aren't optimizing it like they are the newer games in their drivers...so by that fact, 3DMark11 tells me quite a lot about the general performance of my card at any given moment.

 

No clue. I was using 13.4, actually, before upgrading to 13.8 beta 2..which again, dropped my FPS in Nehrim as well as my 3DMark11 scores. I tried 13.4 again and the performance was the same, but 13.1 gave me the 600-700 point increase again. Weird.

 

using driver cleaner only makes the BSOD's appear just use: uninstall in Nvidia driver, uninstall in hardware manager, restart. Install Nvidia drivers. Test with 3dmark11.

I dont think it's temp related but just in case check your temps while running 3dmark, you never know.