Video Card Fried?

[TCfromBN]

Well, it's hard to say.

We recently had a thunderstorm and had some kind of power surge I suppose. Around the same time, I upgraded to the 169.04 beta drivers for my 8800gts. Ever since then, even after rolling back to their regular drivers, I have piss poor performance in 3d applications.

In the ATI tool, I only get 300-400 FPS on the 3d cube, where I used to get well over one thousand. My CoD4 is getting no greater than 30 fps, and Crysis is running noticeably slower than before.

On the other hand, if it was fried, would it even work at all?

Any recommendations to help me figure out what is going on?

 

[AtomicSpark]

If it was fried, it wouldn't work at all. When lightning hit near our place, it blew out an on-board modem. This of course, just happened to fry the motherboard with it. Good thing this was back in the day (before I built PCs) and it had a warranty. In your case, I think it has something more to do with the driver update/rollback then the lightning.

When you did a rollback, did you just re-install the old version over the other one? Or did you do a rollback in the device manager? You could try uninstalling the software/drivers from add and remove programs and do a fresh install of the version you want. I have huge programs with my ATI drivers on my desktop when I only install the drivers and not the CCC. Every time I update them, it acts like I have Hardware Acceleration disabled if I do not do a fresh install.

On a related note, I have heard of hard drives going bad during a power outage/spike. I don't know how, but after we had a big ice storm and we lost power for a few days, my college had a server down due to hard disk failure. The department head claims it was due to the power outage. In any case, you might want to run check disk or something like that to make sure your disk is fine. Who knows, that might make games run slower!

In any case, good luck!

 

[TCfromBN]

So maybe I should completely uninstall the beta drivers and then roll back?

 

[giant384]

use driver cleaner as well.

 

[AtomicSpark]

So maybe I should completely uninstall the beta drivers and then roll back?

Don't perform a rollback. Download the current release driver, uninstall the beta, and install the downloaded one.

 

[TCfromBN]

Well, I used driver cleaner, as well as cc cleaner. But to no avail I still get lower performance.

I wonder if this OC could go bad after 4 weeks. It was stable and didn't run hot though...

 

[TCfromBN]

Bump: I looked at ATI tool again with the 3d box.

I used to have over 1000 fps and now I only have 400.


I've tried an array of different drivers, but to no avail.

 

[TCfromBN]

Tripple bump:

I'm seeing graphical anomalies like that in various games now.

Also:
- In S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I have a rifle with a scope. When I look down it the game almost comes to a complete halt. I've had the rifle before these things started happening and it worked perfectly.

- In Guild Wars I only get about 30 fps, where I used to get well over 70 at all times.