It may be a lazy thing to do to start a new topic (especially as my first post) but this has been irritating me for the last 2 days and Google nor forum search has yielded answers relevant to this exact problem.

I'll first start by listing my short system specs then get into the meat of the issue.

AMD Phenom II X4 980 (3.7 GHz)
4 GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 (3.25 GB Useable *)
Windows 7 Professional 32-bit (This is why RAM says 3.25 GB is usable)
Seagate Barracuda 1 TB HDD 7200 RPM

The problem: I know my video card can play Skyrim on High settings, it used to auto-detect to such. But after a graphics driver update 2 days ago from Catalyst 12.6 to 12.8 and noticing flickering textures (leading to transparent walls) and setting my CCC back to defaults, the game decided to "re-detect" my hardware and won't go higher than "Medium" settings now. No matter what I do in CCC, autodetect won't go above Medium quality.

I could set it to high manually... In fact I did. But I figured to ask in here why it downgraded my graphics to Medium when my hardware sure as heck can handle it on High. Did the new driver negatively impact the performance of my card such that the game has to downgrade itself to work?

Rollback your driver.

if I go that route, do I do it like I would an "update" where I uninstall the driver and CCC before reinstalling the old one? Or do I do it with driver rollback from the video card properties box?