Catalyst AI Questions

As you can see from my other thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/583520-poor-performance-sc2.html I'm having issues with SC2 and catalyst ai. I was having serious performance issues with catalyst ai on with high settings, so I disabled it. With it disabled, my performance was "better" but not great. I was fiddling around today and found that on ULTRA textures and settings with catalyst ai on, my performance is a solid 60 fps with vsync! If I lower it to high, the game gets choppy. I honestly have no clue is going on. My question is - should I use catalyst ai for every game as long as it doesn't cause issues? Should I be using standard or advanced? I did some research and found that catalyst ai on advanced forces alternate frame rendering, and I'm not sure if that's a good thing. Any advice about it would be great. My current SC2 settings is vsync on, reduce mouse lag on, and everything @ ultra. With a bunch of stuff in my base I manage to stay @ a smooth 60. Only in a 200 vs 200 inside a cluttered base do I see any dropping into the 50's. I couldn't even get settings this good on high, let alone ultra. I was using the official dell drivers for my alienware up until recently and I had decent fps with SC2 on high, but I'd been having issues since I installed the official release. Now it seems to work really well, but I don't understand why! I don't understand how LOWER settings (high) would have WORSE performance than my ultra settings. I really need to figure out if I should be using catalyst ai standard, advanced, or none! Any advice would help a ton.

 

If you turn off AI, crossfire won't work.

Some games don't play well with crossfire, so in that case it might benefit you. In general though, I would always leave it on.

 

What about standard vs advanced? Any idea why I was getting really crappy performance in SC2 on high settings, but great performance on ultra? (catalyst ai on standard).