[Solved] HD 7770 low FPS in HL2

[tpg8]

All-

I just "upgraded" from a geForce GTX 550 Ti to a Radeon HD 7770 but am noticing worse performance in GoldenEye: Source (a HL2 mod). With the 550, I was getting over 100fps on most maps with graphics settings maxed (8x AA, 16x anisotropic, everything on high/very high) at 1920x1080 resolution, but with the 7770 I am getting about 40fps at the same settings.

This doesn't seem to make any sense to me... All performance charts have the 550 Ti well below the 7770 in new games, so I would assume an older title like HL2 would be even better for the 7770.

What gives?

Thanks all.

EDIT: Forgot system specs....

AMD Athlon II 3.0 GHz
Asus m4A785td-m motherboard
4GB DDR3 at 1600MHz
XFX Radeon HD 7770 (1Ghz core, 1150 memory clocks)
Windows 7 64-bit

Also, I've verified that everything is installed properly... Windows is happier, giving the 7770 a 7.5/7.5 experience rating...

 

[randomkid]

I would not call a move from the 550Ti to the 7770 am "upgrade". While 7770 is more powerful, it is not very much & performance will be well within striking distance of the 550Ti. The worthy upgrade from the 550Ti would be at least to a 6950 or 560Ti. Any chance you can return the card or exchange it?

By the way, your title say 7750. Must be a typo.

 

[tpg8]

The 7750 in the title was a typo and has been corrected.

I knew that the 7770 should be only somewhat better than the 550 Ti, but I didn't expect the performance to get worse! And, not only is it worse, but by a very significant margin in HL2. Of course, it is still playable. But, going from 100+ fps to 30 feels very wrong.

 

[randomkid]

If you still have any chance to return the card, I would suggest that you do. Given the situation, you will probably be better of to replace it with another 550Ti so you can SLI (but only if your motherboard have 2 PCIe slots).

 

[tpg8]

So apparently the Radeon HD 7000 series generally suffer from poor performance in DirectX9 games (like HL2), which explains my problem. Too bad I didn't read about this before I bought the card.

I wonder if AMD will fix this in a future driver release or if it is a hardware problem...

 

[tpg8]

Just in case anyone else has this problem, I found a solution...

Just after installing the card driver, I went into the AMD Radeon control panel and changed all AA settings so they reflected the "best quality" setting. Apparently this makes the card work overtime for no actual improvement in quality with DirectX 9 games (maybe it helps with DX10+ games without the performance hit). Changing all settings back to "performance" and/or "application preference" fixed the issue - no in-game visual changes were noticed and framerate more than tripled (~100fps average now).