So msi afterburner wont work on 12.4? As thats what ive used for nvidia cards before. But honestly i probably wont oc for a while at least. I may either add another one in the future for xfire or switch to a gtx 660 depending on how both cards compare.

Edit, do you normally overclock with the ati driver? As ive had to use msi for nvidia oc'ing

MSI Afterburner works with 12.4...well, fan profiles and so forth do. I've never used it for overclocking as I don't overclock. And yes, you can overclock an AMD card with MSI Afterburner, Trixx, the CCC Overdrive feature, and so on. At least in theory. As I said, I don't overclock.

Ah fair enough. Thats something i'll look forward to using over a nvidia driver

Overclocking a 7850 on Skyrim may not increase your frame rate. You may get better results by OCing your cpu a bit.

Im using 12.1 and Im not having any problems. Is it safe to upgrade to 12.4 or 12.5 with a Radeon HD 6970 2gb?

I have the Radeon 6870 Sapphire HD II and a Quad-core AMD Athlon 630 II.

From what I'm reading in this thread, I should just use the stock Windows 7 drivers, no?

I don't have any experience with 12.5--I tend not to use beta/preview drivers and stick with the WHQL certified ones. I'm not having any problems with 12.4 myself on the same card model, but as this thread shows, apparently everyone's different.

You can upgrade if you want, but if you aren't having any issues with 12.1, as the saying goes...if it ain't broke, don't fix it.


AFAIK, the "stock Windows" drivers are furnished by AMD, but they may not necessarily be up to date or installed properly. I'd stick with drivers straight from the horse's mouth rather than what Windows thinks might be the best drivers for my system, personally.

Arguably the best drivers are the 12.2 preview drivers, 12.2 WHQL are avoidable due to the anti aliasing bug & 12.3/12.4 work fine for me, A lot of issues are caused by upgrading the drivers rather than doing a clean install.

I've been using AMD cards exclusively for many years & there have been two sets of drivers that have given me issues, 11.6's & 12.2 WHQL's, The rest have installed fine after following my pattern of uninstall/install & i never use Driver Sweeper.

I know AMD have had their moments of driver stupidity, However it has to be said that most of the issues are user error rather than AMD idiocy, In my humble opinion that is.

80% user error 20% AMD driver idiocy.

The latest 1.5 patch is not helping though, 1.4 felt a hell of a lot better.

My game is runnin great with 12.4 drivers. It's a good idea to always remove the old drivers from the control panel, then driver sweep the rest out, before installing the new ones. For some reason this is actually a necessity on my computer or I get issues with CCC not working.

Crossfire 5850 1gb 890/1225mhz
Gskill 7-8-7-24 8gb 1600mhz
X4 965 3.9ghz

Hmm I'll try the driver sweeper tonight if needed. This morning AMD let me know that 12.4 drivers were available (thanks for the timely update? haha) so I downloaded/installed them. Didn't have time to test them yet, but after work I'll see how things are.

Before I upgraded drivers, 12.3 was working perfectly...hopefully I didn't just open a can of worms..

Windows 7 "stock" drivers are simply WHQL certified drivers that Microsoft happened to include/add to their update service. They are usually out of date. I would not rely on Microsoft branded graphics device drivers. Get your drivers from AMD itself or if reference drivers aren't compatibility, find the drivers on your OEM's website.

Also you shouldn't need to use a driver cleaner or even manually uninstall the driver. Catalyst drivers automatically uninstall any previously driver files during the installation of the new driver. The only reason you need to manually uninstall/clean up a driver package, is when you change from nvidia to AMD, or vice versa, or if you are using a non-reference driver package to a reference driver package or vice versa.

AMD drivers have a tendency to cause BSoD when installed, especially when you are using a AMD based Southbridge (motherboard chipset).

Just noticed that 12.4 drivers are finally available also at the AMD's WEB site. I downloded them and installed, and now my CCC says that I have v12.2 installed (was 12.3 before I uninstalled it). I then tested the update via CCC option and after that it still says that I have 12.2 installed and a newer 12.4 is available. I'm starting to think that a Nvidia card would be nice.

BTW it still has the same fps drop problem as I mentioned in earlier posts. I uninstalled the previous drivers via Control Panel, booted, then manually deleted everything related to AMD or ATI in C:\, C:\Program Files and C:\Program Files (x86), ran CCleaner, deleted everything ATI related that was possible to delete in System and SysWOW64 folders, but still this happens.

BSoD? I'm not sure what that means Also, I do have a AMD CPU.

Thanks for the help!

Blue Screen of Death/ STOP Errors (or causes the system to automatically restart).

Just because you have an AMD CPU doesn't mean you have a AMD based chipset. AMD CPUs run on nVidia nForce, VIA, and SIS chipset also (might be leaving one out).

Are you sure, that you still have CCC. AMD started using Vision Engine Control Center, back awhile ago. Granted, there isn't much of a different. Manually deleting stuff is most likely what is causing the Control Center to read the driver incorrectly.

Drivers are like "smithing" perks...try un-installing again! ALSO--when you are prompted to remove the gpu hardware...do so. THEN install the new drivers.

I finally managed to get it working. I have to use Driver Sweeper and do manually some editing in the registry files. There were leftovers from quite old Catalyst versions - 10.2 was the oldest I found. After "succesfull" installation it still looks that the newest 12.4 version just is a lot slower than 12.3 in my machine. BTW it seems that the current Win7 version for AMD drivers is 12.2. At least that I found in the registry before I installed the AMD's drivers.

Umm, the current version is 8.961-120405a-137224C-ATI (12.4).

If for some reason the driver won't install correctly the best way to fix it, is to not uninstall everything, but to install a driver known to install correctly. Then you attempt to install the newer driver.

The problem with uninstalling everything is that the control center part may not install correctly, but the actual driver itself may.

The version info for 12.4 was finally correct, this new numbering is just too long for me to use . Before I went into extremes I also tested to install on a working version but it was not working. There must have been something left in my registry that caused those problems. Now I'm back to 12.3 and everything is working ok again, and I also got my HD and registry cleaned.

I say it all the time use ccleaner(or any reg cleaner) and clean your registry, after uninstalling the old driver.

My PC's power supply blew, so I pulled out the hard drive (Win 7 64-bit install) and threw it in this backup machine, which has a Radeon HD 3650 512 MB. Previously, this machine had Win XP 32-bit and the 12.1 Catalyst drivers, and Skyrim ran fine. Well, fine on medium settings, anyway. When I booted into Win 7 with the same hardware and the 12.4 drivers, however, this happened:

http://tesalliance.org/forums/uploads/1336341880/gallery_1333_105_468547.png

I re-installed Skyrim and my video drivers to no avail. I tried searching, but "Skyrim graphic glitches" and such gave too much data to wade through. Any of you gurus have any ideas?

Ok, I installed 12.4 using Catalyst Control Center. Presumably it auto-uninstalled my previous drivers? I didn't use any driver sweeper or manual uninstall.

I'm getting anywhere from 45fps (worst) to 62fps (best) according to Frapps. I use a lot of texture mods (Lush trees/grass etc.) and my lowest frame rate is in a forest, even then, it's nowhere near bad.

My settings are ultra with FXAA. I also have a few post processing/lighting/HD mods.

Did you reinstall Catalyst 12.1. Radeon HD 3 series aren't going to get a lot of performance improvement from "the" most recent drivers and 12.1 was pretty good, especially for Skyrim.

I have just seen a post by the CatalystCreator on twitter in which he provides a link for people to provide feedback on problems and issues they may be having with the drivers the link is here http://t.co/42ubZl7N

Here is his twitter https://twitter.com/#!/CatalystCreator

May not get your problem solved but at least it can feel like you can give them feedback. I reported still experiencing texture flicker in Skyrim with 12.4 even though it was supposedly fixed.....

Thanks, guys! After reading your responses and http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1373190-graphics-problems-with-ati-radeon/, I've decided to go back to the 12.1 drivers. Will poke you again if that doesn't fix it, but somehow I suspect it will.