HD5850 worse performance issue

I would say that there is still registry entries lingering from your old card. I would use driver sweep program. I believe it is free. And then reinstall the drivers. Give it a go. Good luck.

I did do that:

try installin windows 7 64 bit not 32 bit since u have more than 4gb of total ram

True you can't tell the difference in performance with one game, however performance should not be worse that what it once was. That's what's been confusing me.

As zipzoomflyhigh stated, the ATI 5850 should be night and day (though may not notice with a game like WoW).

The ATI 4850 is a great card. Consider though that the 4870 (next step up) is about equal to the ATi 5770. And it takes two 5770's to compare to the ATi 5850. So it's a large performance jump.

Anyhow, I would definitely try to benchmark your new video card with other games. WoW isn't really the best game to be testing graphics performance anyhow, as WoW is severely limited by CPU (because of plugins & such) and internet latencies.

A synthetic benchmark like 3dMark06 would give you a much better comparison between the two since it is capable of truly testing over all GPU performance. Then try other games and use something like Fraps (free version) to visually monitor FPS and see if there's a change.

Also, keep in mind, that depending on the resolution you're playing the game at, you may not even see much performance difference. If your CPU is what's already limiting over all performance in certain games, the video card upgrade may not show you any real gains. For example, WoW doesn't really utilize a Quad Core CPU, so even having a great CPU isn't going to change up WoW performance much. That game would probably see more gains with a really fast dual core than a lower speed quad.

^Agreed

I ran 3DMark06 to benchmark my comp. Going back to the WoW thing, what I can't understand is that the difference between running the game on a Friday at 3:00, exiting and installing a new graphics card correctly and running it at 3:30 on Friday why there is a significant loss of framerate. That is what is absolutely confounding me at this moment.

Would it be worth trying out the 10.4 drivers over the 10.5 drivers?

I wonder if Blizzard hasn't yet optimized WoW for the HD5850 yet and that's why the HD4850 runs better. I will see if anyone else that uses this card has the same problems on the forums.

I saw this posted on the WoW forums. Can anyone elaborate on what Tim is referring to and how I may go about doing that? This may fix my issue.

Maybe use MSI Afterburner to tune your 5850. Thats what I have done with my Sapphire 5850. Core is set to 765 mhz and memory 1125 mhz. Give it a try.

Sounds like the Catalyst Driver and the ATI 5850 are not recognizing WoW as a 3D application (if this guy's issue is even the same as yours).

You can certainly try the Catalyst 10.4 instead of 10.5 and see if there's any change.

Also, you could confirm what clock speeds your 5850 is running while you're in WoW. Just to see if that's even your problem to begin with.

Sounds like a driver issue to me...

...5850 is a good card, I wish I could do what you did. Still stuck with the overheating 4850...

this seems like it could be a possiblilty, you might want to try getting gpu-z which is free, then go to the sensor tap, click the log to text file, run Wow, or any other games your trying to test.

Now exit out of the game check the text file and make sure you card is getting upto it's full clockrate

So it's my understanding that all I need to do is go into CCC and click on the "Overdrive" tab, "unlock" it and manually set my core clock to 765-775Mhz and Memory to 1125Mhz?

By messing with just those two settings is there anyway that can damage or hurt the card?

Date , GPU Core Clock [MHz] , GPU Memory Clock [MHz]
2010-06-07 11:19:44 , 157.0 , 300.0 ,
2010-06-07 11:21:19 , 725.0 , 1000.0 ,
2010-06-07 11:21:20 , 157.0 , 300.0 ,

It went up to 725 once while running WoW. So there's a snippet of what happened. It does indeed look like it isn't powering up like it should.

I did these things, ran WoW and that seems to have fixed the problem. It looks like it's an issue with WoW not being recognized as a 3D application.

I appreciate all the help and comments and suggestions that were given. Now it looks like I'll make a final post on Blizz's Tech Support site to see if they have anything planned to fix it and send something to ATI.

Thanks again.

Yes, unlock your CCC and move the sliders towards the desired clock.

No, it will not damage anything unless you overvolt your card past 1.3v and temps surpass 90c.

I have 2 OC'ing profiles for my 5850, one is set at 950/1175 1.2v and the other is set to 1000/1250 1.24v and both run perfectly fine.