Sudden performance issues with Radeon HD6690

MrBearington

Honorable
Jan 27, 2014
4
0
10,510
I've had my Sager NP8170 laptop for almost two years now, and it has always had extremely high performance in games. Perfect framerate in 1920x1080 in just about everything I played. But today I booted up Dark Souls after not having played it for a few months and I barely had 15 FPS! I downloaded the resolution fix for it, but that just made it go from bad to worse. Worryingly, I checked other games and sure enough games I used to play perfectly now have 15-20 fps. I'm extremely worried, as my computer has never given me trouble like this before. I dusted out the fans and heatsinks not too long ago, and the temperatures for my cpu/gpu aren't getting high while I'm playing these games. I even tried updating the drivers to no avail. Please help me!
 

MrBearington

Honorable
Jan 27, 2014
4
0
10,510
Alright, I solved the issue. I was scrolling through the Catalyst Control Center with a game open when I noticed that my core clock speed was at 100mhz instead of 715! I tried a few things, but what worked was setting the maximum clock speed to 710 mhz. Anything above that and my clock speed would go back to 100mhz. Any idea why this is happening?