Catalyst Control Center nowhere to be found?

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half_derpy

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So, I recently switched from Nvidia GPU's, so AMD. Mostly, everything has gone smoothly (mostly). However, I am trying to get Catalyst Control Center, so that I can edit game profiles to my liking. I cannot freaking find it anywhere. I downloaded the Catalyst Software Suite from AMD's official site Here

It says in that download that it comes with catalyst control center, but I have looked all over my hard drive and can't find the damn program. I uninstalled, then reinstalled. Nothing. I uninstalled, and installed 12.7 software suite, nothing. I can see it even in my startup on Msconfig, but cannot find the damn .exe

I know it's probably something really stupid, and I am just missing it, but can anyone help?

The only program that I can actually find is AMD Vision Engine Control Center, but I can't find profiles/CCC within that program.
 
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The only reason you would want to force something in Catalyst is if the game itself does not support it. Surprisingly Arma II is not GPU bound much at all, it's VERY CPU bound and bound by the bottleneck between the developer's keyboard and chair.

If you want to improve...
I had this same issue awhile back. My solution: I didn't worry about it. Basically I just went without it. With one card and one monitor, I didn't really need it. If you want to adjust the fan or overclock on a single card, you might as well just get like MSI Afterburner to do that.

If you have dual monitors or multiple cards, it might not work. I only got mine to work after re-installing Windows.
 

half_derpy

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I am only running one monitor and one GPU. I have afterburner, but I am not so interested in overclocking. I play a couple of games that are kind of iffy on the FPS and I know I could get it higher with just some tweaking and all of the guides I find, go through using it, so it'd be really nice to have.

Bah!
 

half_derpy

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I've got an XFX HD Radeon 6870 Double D.
 


You can't actually "edit" predefined game profiles in CCC. They're there, you just cant see them. You may have to install the latest Catalyst Application Profiles though because some driver suites come with them included while other's do not. What you can do though is override them. If you create a custom profile and point it to the same executable as that defined in a hidden profile it will prompt you to override it.

If you have an AMD processor and chipset I believe that it will be called the "vision engine control center" and this includes The Catalyst Control Center. If you have it installed on an Intel chipset, it will just be Catalyst Control Center and this can easily be accessed from your desktop by right clicking and selecting "Catalyst Control Center"
 

half_derpy

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I do indeed have an AMD cpu (phenom ii x6 1045t stock). What I am looking to do, is edit graphic settings from the catalyst program for Day Z to help boost fps. I was using This for reference. I used that guide when I had my GTS 450 and it helped boost my fps significantly. Now that I reverted back to a new card, I need to do it again because my fps is actually worse on this better card. If that makes sense. (They call me half derpy for a reason)
 

larkspur

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Like pinhedd said, CCC is "AMD Vision Engine Control Center" when you have a system with an AMD CPU. It's to put all the AMD controls in one place. Open Vision Engine and go to the "Gaming" category and choose "3D Application settings".
 


Does this boost performance or something? I'm more wondering than questioning, trying to learn here. What does "editing" the predefined profiles do?
 

half_derpy

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You know, I saw that option and in a stroke of genius, I thought that pertained to 3d gaming/monitors and bypassed it, thinking nothing of it. I will give that a try. If that's the answer, I am going to feel full_derpy.

Well, it seems that now I can't even access vision engine control center. I click it and it looks like it's loading very quickly, then nothing at all happens.
 

half_derpy

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Sure.

XFX Radeon HD 6870 Double D
8 gigs G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 1600mhz DDR3 RAM
Phenom ii x6 1045t (stock)
Asus M4n685-m v2 micro atx
7200 rpm seagate barracuda 1tb
 

larkspur

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Yep, try that. I run 12.1 (and none but but gods of laziness know why) and have the option to create an "application profile" which will load my pre-defined settings when running the game's .exe. I imagine the latest version has this option also.
 

larkspur

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Hmmm, reboot try again. I can right-click my desktop and then choose CCC (I have an Intel CPU though).

Did you fully uninstall your Nvidia drivers? Make sure those are gone, try the nvidia uninstaller and/or Driver Sweeper if you haven't already. You may just want to uninstall and reinstall the AMD graphics drivers again too since things are weird. Usually the uninstall will work fine but Driver Sweeper can help make sure you are starting from a fresh slate.
 

half_derpy

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Yeah I got all of the Nvidia drivers out the other day. I have been using the card for 3 days. The first day, I had a driver hiccup, but got that sorted and everything was smooth. Then, I started fiddling with crap I didn't need to. The Engine center WAS working, I am sure I'll get it again. I fully uninstalled it and am reinstalling it now. If that doesn't work, I'll try driver sweeper and start over.
 


The only reason you would want to force something in Catalyst is if the game itself does not support it. Surprisingly Arma II is not GPU bound much at all, it's VERY CPU bound and bound by the bottleneck between the developer's keyboard and chair.

If you want to improve performance a bit do the following.

1. Turn off AA and post processing in game, or at least turn them down. Same with draw distance

2. In SixUpdater set the "memory allocator" to "system". By default it uses Intel's Thread Building Blocks library which isn't the most appropriate tool for the job because its still under heavy development. Window's built in allocator will actually improve performance by quite a bit and cut down on lag in big cities

3. Move the game to an SSD if possible.

4. Remember that DayZ is an Alpha, good performance is not expected.
 
Solution


The application profiles are only strictly necessary for Crossfire. AMD often has to work around quirks in game engines where Alternate Frame Rendering is not natively supported and this can take a bit of work.

Sometimes application developers will issue updates to games that actually undo the work that AMD did but the profile will still be applied anyway. The only way to work around this is to disable crossfire entirely or manually override the profile to disable crossfire for just that application.
 


That's what I thought. I thought it was only a Crossfire thing.
 

larkspur

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Let's not get confused. Two separate things called "application profiles". One are the CAPs related to CrossFire and the other are user-defined settings (mostly overrides) that can be specified for any individual 3D app by using CCC or Vision. You can set up multiple "profiles" - one for each app.

Being able to force settings is pretty important for some games especially when they are first released (AA with SW:TOR comes to mind) so let's not discount the fact that we have options. That being said, I just looked and nothing in that page that halfderpy linked is going to make a difference in Catalyst/Vision. Most of those settings can't be manually set from within CCC/Vision amd the rest are default app-controlled...
 

half_derpy

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Of course. I don't have an SSD yet, but will hopefully soon. I just know that after I did those settings, it made a highly noticeable difference in my fps with the GTS 450, so I was hoping to do the same with the 6870. It's not that I get a bad framerate with everything but PP maxed, but I wish it was better of course :p
 

half_derpy

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Man I guess I really boned something up. I uninstalled AMD Vision, booted into safe mode, ran Driver Sweeper and removed all AMD display drivers, booted into regular, installed catalyst suite again, rebooted, and it still won't open. Damn it.
 

larkspur

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Just a thought - If you have multiple monitors or a TV connected then check them, make sure it isn't popping up there. I have 4 monitors and silly CCC never remembers which monitor it was last closed on and pops up on my left-most monitor on desktop #1 every time I open it.

But Pinhedd's advice is really the best here - change settings within the game for best results. Those settings on that page you linked aren't going to help you in CCC. They are mostly default settings and app control flags which CCC will default to already. Some of the other settings on that page aren't editable in CCC. So getting into Vision likely won't help you anyway. But it is strange that you can't get in. Are games still running or is that all boned up too?
 

half_derpy

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Yeah, I just played Day Z for like 20 minutes with no issues.

Hm. So weird that it just won't open at all, but I guess it's not really needed.
 


There are still a few lingering bugs in Catalyst which can prevent it from being opened if it is upgraded from an earlier version. I had this same issue on my Laptop, the best solution is to just reformat.
 

half_derpy

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Of course a format is always an option, but I am not ready to go down that road yet. I have too many project files scattered all around this HDD to format at the moment. Might spend some time backing stuff up and starting over in the near future, but probably not today XD
 
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