Hi everyone!
Before sending a letter to ATI/AMD, I tought I'll write about my problem here to see if anyone else are experiencing the same problem as me with the latest Catalyst 10.2 driver.
My system specs:
OS: windows 7 64bit
CPU: Core i7 3,3 GHz (TurboBoost always off)
GPU: Radeon HD5780
MEM: 6GB DDR3 1600 MHz
Windower 3.42 (1280x768, bg 2048x2048, 16:10)
Yesterday, when i upgraded my Catalyst drivers from 9.10 to 10.2, i experienced a weird FFXI world lag or stuttering. While my character movements felt normal and the Windower reported always the framerate at 29.4, the objects that I was walking by in Altepa desert felt to me very stuttering. It was hard to "eyeball" the exact framerate on these world objects, but after so many years of playing FFXI it didnt feel normal and it couldn't be higher than 10 - 15 fps.
Since I just had upgraded the Catalyst drivers to 10.2, I immediately suspected they were the cause. I started investigating my system to see if anything else could be wrong. But i couldn't really find anything useful. What I did notice thought, was the fact that CPU usage were almost 0% when moving around in the game. Also, both CPU and GPU temperatures were lower than what they usually are. It was like the game didn't use any resources at all. Normally the CPU temp would be around 36 C and GPU 65 C while playing FFXI, but with version 10.2, they were 33 and 55 respectively. Because FFXI uses only one core, its usually easy to see which one is doing the work when no other apps are running, but with the 10.2, the CPU usage was so low that I wasn't even able to see from the Task Manager which core is doing the work while I was running. (I'm sorry, I did take a screenshot, but I don't have rights to post URL's to pictures on this forum).
After hours of playing, testing and several restarts, I decided to roll the Catalyst drivers back to 9.10 to see if things get back to normal. And guess what? Things did get back to normal. There is no world stuttering, objects pass by smooth and CPU/CPU temperatures were back to where they used to be. It's also easy to see which core is doing the work when the game is running.
Normally, the lower CPU usage would be a good thing. But not when it also lowers the gaming performance. It is possible that some kind of power saving feature kicks in with FFXI, but I didnt find any way to configure it in the Catalyst Control Center. All other settings are set to "Use application settings".
I wonder if anyone else with similar system are experiencing those problems with Catalyst version 10.2? Also, could there be any way to fix it without downgrading the Catalyst to 9.10. I would hate to be stuck with old drivers forever.
PS. I also tested Bad Company 2 and DiRT2 with both Catalyst versions, but I didn't see any difference between the drivers and they both handled the games very smooth.