Hey guys. Anyways, as most of you know, Nvidia's classic control panel is perfect and given to man from God. However, Nvidia is trying to get rid of it because they are a bunch of witches or something. SO, I've bought a 3850 out of spite.

What are the perfect drivers to use with a 3850 for somebody who loved the Nvidia classic control panel and plays video games?

(Windows XP, btw)

The newest one's??

Performance wise i'd say go back to CCC 7.10, but 7.11 and the hotfix sort out the trouble with odd textures in Crysis. Also for benchmarking the 7.11 drivers drop your overall 3DMark06 score down about 150 points i found.

If you don't want to mess with control panels, you can access all of the controls by right-clicking the icon in your system tray, in both Ati and Nvidia drivers.

Just use the newest driver on the manufacturer's site.

Yes, I hate 7.11 too for the 3870. I am waiting for 7.12!

I downloaded 7.11 and lost 15-20 FPS. My 3870 was playing BF2142 between 20-30FPS and COD4 was 30-50. They were 50-70 with 7.10. I thought it was my imagination until i read this thread. I had already uninstalled 7.11 and reinstalled 7.10.

I also stopped OCing my 3870 with ATI overdrive. It kept crashing anything over 800/2400 and it was only at ~80 degrees c at highest load. I probably need aftermarket cooling, but i dont like ATI overdrive. So i set it all back to default.

At default clocks and CCC 7.10, all is good. I run at Medium to high settings, 2xor4x AA and 4xor8xAF depending on the game.

Anyone using Omega drivers? Back when i had a x700 pro, Omega was pretty good stuff.

I to prefer nvidia drivers. ATI/CCC is so picky. CCC settings must be tweaked endlessly to get stable FPS. Nvidia install and forget. With that said, i love my 3870. I can live with CCC.

Is this normal with 38xx cards? I have 1950XT and I noticed that Overdrive is incompatible with ATI tools. Could that be the problem? I like CCC and I'd like to keep it after I upgrade.

What settngs are you talking about? I leave my settings stock except for AA/AF to enhance image quality, and it's been stable for me...

What does ccc stand for?

CCC = Catalyst Control Center. It is the control panel for ATI settings.

Cleeve. I agree. I went back to stock settings and all is good now. I Use AA & AF settings in the games.

Maybe, I was screwing with them to much.

ccc = Catalyst Control Center.

Tried a couple of games just to double check Crysis and BF2. Image wise if you change setting from 'Application Setting' it seems to get worse jaggies/ blurred textures. Only thing that makes a massive difference is 'Mipmap detail' set to 'Quality'. Makes medium Crysis look like High x2 AA. As for BF2 Mipmap has to be on 'quality'. The image AA actually decreases with AA or AF on in CCC. Maybe it's just my comp but this is just what i've found out with trail and error.

I noticed CCC and game settings differ between Call of Duty 4 and BF2142. I paly COD4 much more so it rules for now. I leave CCC set for COD4 and tweaked BF2142 in game. I have BF2, TeamFortress2 and Quake4 maxed out all the way and they look great.

Keep playing COD 4 through on Arcade mode atm competing with mates to get higher scores. Must admit it's not that gfx demanding. My secondary comp with the AGP 512mb X1950 pro eats that game aswell as any PSU under 600W (maxed 25 min- 70max fps. I took a while to realize the mipmap had to be on quality before it looked great i.e seeing the weave of the SAS jumpers etc... My main game is BF2 and must admit my rig is way overpowered to play it, but hey .

yep. COD4 is put together well. It looks very good, but it doesnt eat up hardware. cough, cough, crysis. Other than my 3870 my machine is old. A pentium 4, but COD4 looks awesome.

The problem i have is loading maps and my CPU hitting 100%, not graphics.

The biggest problem i am having with CCC is resolution and refresh rate. My monitor will go to 75hz and native is 1650x1050 or whatever. But CCC won't let me do both. It sets my res at 1024x768 at 75hz. It also doesn't run well with vert sync and tri-buffering.

Otherwise standard setting set to quality and all is good in CCC.