New drivers cause performance loss?

The strangest thing happened when I upgraded my Catalyst drivers to version 7.6 from 7.5. I noticed that games like Overlord and MTW2 ran much worse than before. The fps was halved in most cases while playing. I just coudln't understand why. My 3dMark06 score dropped from 3000 to 2500 and the problem persisted even when I downgraded to catalyst 7.5. Finally I downgraded to 7.1 and the problem was solved.

You usually hear how important it is to update your drivers but the opposite seems to be true in some cases.

 

Maybe the drivers didn't install properly.

 

I doubt it. I used the catalyst uninstall utility every time.
So there wasn't any driver conflict I suppose.

 

Yeah, sometimes there can be performance loss/gains by installing newer drivers, thats why they say if it isn't broken don't fix it.

 

I guess you're right. I'll stick with the 7.1 Catalyst even though they're almost half a year old and Steam complains about them being out of date. I haven't had any problems with them so far.

 

It can vary. I just updated to new drivers on my card and got 100 points more on my 3D Mark 06 score. You just have to play round and figure out which drivers are best for your card.

 

Usually unless there is something significant to be gained by going to newer drivers I stick to the one I know are stable and have good performance.

It is quite possible that there were some conflicts. If this happens again, make sure you run a registry cleaner. There's a link to our driver update guide in the General Index sticky at the top of this forum.

 

I see that you have a DX10 card and Windows Vista which is probably the reason for the improvement. Nvidia and ATI are putting a lot of effort into making the new drivers more efficient for dx10 cards and Vista. My guess is that the new GPU drivers are less effective for computers with old dx9 cards and WinXP. In fact new drivers may even be detrimental for older systems. The best thing to do is experiment like you said _bare.

 

3DMark scores literally mean nothing and STEAM complains but just ignore it, its dumb anyways.

 

razer: same thing happened to me just now razor. same specs too. x1800 on xp MCE. i upgraded to 7.6 from ati.com and i can tell that my system is lagging/slowing a bit. aside from the drop on fps in my games.windows seem to be slower than usual. it even hanged up on me during the windows welcome page. i might consider rollingback to 7.1. which program do you use to check fps on games??

 

I used Fraps.

 

i will say that usually driver releases focus on bringing up performance and compatibility with the new cards, but a lot of times they fix specific issues with a wider range of cards, that either increase stability or performance or both.

and they definitely should not be decreasing your performance. maybe it was a bad release, and will be fixed in the next version. or maybe it was a registry issue.