Hello,

Has anyone had any experience upgrading drivers via Steam?

Last weekend, a popup from Steam came through advertising to upgrade my CPU and GPU processors (AMD and Radeon 5540). I tried the download/install, but it crashed the system before it could finish.

Yesterday I finished the download and installed the drivers.

At first, everything looked really, really good! The textures were smoother, detail finer, and the speed seemed slightly increased. However, there were odd pixel's glitching across my screen. I reloaded drivers through Windows 7 (the automatic detect drivers feature) and everything seems fine.

Any idea what caused this? I also downloaded patch 1.5 and removed any new mods that may have caused the glitch.

Thanks!

Avoid. Download from here http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/downloads.aspx and uninstall your current driver before installing new one.

Thanks! So you think that the issue was from the Steam download? Should I not trust those things?

No, the pixelation/artifacts issue is with AMD's drivers specifically. It's a known issue with 12.2 that will be fixed with 12.3.

As for Steam's driver downloads...YMMV. Personally, I prefer to handle upgrades like that myself on my own schedule, and not when a program decides it's time for me to upgrade. It also means I can avoid issues like 12.2 being an epic fail of a release. It's personal preference on that front, but I always recommend/prefer manual upgrades.

Seems every program is now trying to update your Video drivers for you -- guess they have been having trouble getting people to keep their video drivers up to date so now have several third parties involved in the process --- (ie. Windows Update, Steam ) -- best to just say no to those prompts and then check the AMD site if\when you are ready to update because most of the time those third party sites are a few months behind on the release anyway and I always like getting the video drivers directly from AMD rather than a third party that may have tweaked them so if you run into problems you know it is the official driver and not some tweak added somewhere along the line.

That said in this case the problem you are having is in the drivers themselves with the AA that is used in game and should be fixed with the next update so best to just avoid the 12.2 driver unless you need them for some other program in which case disable AA in the Skyrim launcher.

Thank you all. Very helpful.