Stuttering related to hardware acceleration on AMD cards

[attacus]

I'm getting serious screen stuttering with my Gigabyte 7970. I think hardware acceleration's to blame because stuttering occurs whenever the GPU changes clock speed. Is there a way to turn off hardware acceleration in Catalyst Control Suite 13.9 or 13.12? The normal method of Display Settings -> Advanced Settings -> Troubleshoot Tab has the troubleshoot button greyed out.

 

[smeezekitty]

What kind of stutter? When does it happen?

 

[attacus]

• 
  When playing a video in a browser (hw acc disabled in flash and browsers)
  When playing a video using media player/VLC
  When just booting up into the desktop with no foreground programs running