Graphics lagging during gameplay with HD6870

[jkelley9]

I have been having this problem for a while now. The only computer game I play at the moment is WoW, and I used to play on a

Zotac GTS450 Fermi (810MHz core, 1620MHz shader, 192 processor cores, 128-bit, 1GB, GDDR5, PCIe 2.0)

but have recently upgraded to an

XFX HD6870 (900MHz core, 4.2Gbps EMC, 1120 spus, 2GB, GDDR5, 256-bit, PCIe 2.1)

I was able to play pretty smoothly with the GTS450 but during intensive graphical and CPU moments (raiding) my FPS would drop pretty severely (Maybe 10 fps? I wasn't monitoring at the time) which affected gameplay to the point where I felt I needed to upgrade. Unfortunately, while the HD6870 has increased graphics a decent amount, it's still not where I think it should be. Supposedly (from what I've been reading) I should be able to max out all settings at 1680x1050 and run everything on ultra settings and be fine. But I've had to tone down some of the less important settings quite a bit (low) to get a good gameplay experience.

My question is: am I missing something? Have I been misinformed?

System specs:
AMD Phenom II x4 965 3.4GHz BE (have OC'd stable to 4.0GHz on air to see if that helped, it did not)
16GB (4x4GB) 1333 DDR3
Sata 6.0GB/s (basically not a SSD, I know 6gb/s vs 3gb/s isn't a performance increase)
BIOSTAR A870 mobo

Thanks!

 

[sonexpc]

Do you uninstall all you nvidia Driver before you install the ATI Driver.... and do you just use that come with the Video Card or you download the Driver from AMD Web site... Better download the lastest one.... The driver come with the Video card may be 1 years older...

If still have problem Download Process Explorer from Microsoft ..and see what happen when you have problem

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653

 

[rage33]

+1^ download the latest from the AMD website. also download diver sweeper and remove any and all old nvidia drivers that may be trapped deep within your HDD.

 

[snakebitex]

Hello.

Sounds to me as a bottle neck problem. If i had your problem first thing i will check is 1. temperatures cpu ,ram,vga while gaming. 2.test older drivers with newest drivers. 3.play with graphics details maybe drop shadows to medium , change antializing etc...
Hope with helps.

 

[Gman450]

It's definitely not a bottleneck issue.

But like the other members said, see if you have got the latest drivers for your HD 6870.
If you installed it from the disk they gave you, chance is that it might be really old.

Download the latest drivers from AMD's website.
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

 

[jkelley9]

It turns out it was the drivers. I knew that I needed to have the newest ones and I thought I had already downloaded and installed them, but it looks like I only downloaded a "patch" driver at the time over the old drivers. After redownloading the full newest driver things ran a little more smoothly when gaming

I then tried the driver sweeper and it turns out there were lots of registries and things from my nvidia card that needed to be cleaned up, and this increased my performance a little bit too I think.

I'm now running all settings on ultra just fine I think, only dipping to about 30 fps at extreme loads

Thanks for the help!

 

[jkelley9]

Best answer selected by jkelley9.