Some hardware likes older drivers.

TimTim Southwest PA Icrontian
edited December 2008 in Science & Tech
Case in point - my Radeon X850 Pro 256 MB graphics card.

When I first installed it a few months ago, I had to go through several of the Radeon / ATI driver versions to find one that worked well on it.

I recently did a repair install of XP on my PC because it was starting to have problems 4 years after the last install.

I went through driver versions 7.8 and 8.3. On 8.3, World of Warcraft was running around 10 frames per second, whereas my HP DV6000 laptop on XP Home, 2 GB ram, 2 Ghz CPU, and Geforce Go 7200 graphics was around 30 FPS with the same character standing in the same spot.

I uninstalled the 8.3 drivers and found the older 6.4 drivers. Installed them, checked WoW, and my FPS was in the 30-40 range, just like that!:rolleyes:

Is this a common thing, where new drivers are not the best ones?

Comments

  • DrLiamDrLiam British Columbia
    edited December 2008
    I have a Radeon X800xl and have gone through almost all the updates. (Against my better judgment.) Now, I have never suspected updated drivers to lower my fps but I wouldn't be surprised. Older drivers may give better performance since newer drivers would come with a whole lot of features our cards don't use.

    I would think about downgrading if someone does a confirming test on this. Heck, maybe I should test it but I'm pretty amatuer @ reviews.
  • KhaosKhaos New Hampshire
    edited December 2008
    Is this a common thing, where new drivers are not the best ones?
    Definitely. In light of the recent cost cuts at Nvidia and ATI/AMD, it will probably get more common in the next couple of years as less resources are expended on legacy QA, too.

    This is one of the great dangers of unified drivers. After a card is a couple of generations by the wayside, any driver updates are more likely to decrease performance rather than increase it simply because the companies are no longer focused on improving performance in 1-2 year old cards or testing with 1-2 year old systems. The QA budget has to go somewhere. It's always a good idea to keep copies of "last known good" drivers around, which luckily you did. ;)

    Of course there's no harm in trying the latest drivers -- particularly when Windows Update breaks your old drivers -- but be prepared for a performance hit and have that "known good" driver ready if the new one doesn't perform as well for you.

    All that being said, don't get all extreme with it. I gotta chuckle at myself because I guarantee you I still have CD's labeled "Geforce Drivers". Yeah, that's a Gainward GeForce SDR (1) I'm talking about here. It was a nice upgrade from my Riva TNT / Voodoo2 duo!

    And yes, I still had the card as of my last move, too. Never know when I might need to pop that sucker in.
  • TimTim Southwest PA Icrontian
    edited December 2008
    I uninstalled the drivers for the X850 and installed the 5.12 drivers (November 22, 2005) release date. I was only able to play WoW on it for a few minutes but it looked good.

    I noticed that in Northrend, WoW is taking about 650 MB of RAM to run. It used to be 200-400 MB in Outlands and Azeroth.
  • trolltroll Windsor, Nova Scotia Icrontian
    edited December 2008
    If the X850 is AGP, there have been a large set of drivers from ATI where the AGP support was totally broken, (Most of the early 8 series up to . I run the 8.11's without a problem now on my X1950. Sometimes you'll need to reinstall DirectX after the driver install.

    http://support.ati.com/ics/support/KBAnswer.asp?questionID=31542

    They say good past 8.2, but I didn't have any luck till 8.9
  • TimTim Southwest PA Icrontian
    edited December 2008
    My X850 is AGP, I'll rerun the directx install and see what that does.
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