ATI / AMD Intermediate Fix for Radeon HD 5800 Series and maybe some others

[noah]

I followed the common advice and upgraded.. Ended up getting 10 seconds between each FPS. So I decided to bite the bullet and downgrade. I also play BioShock Infinite and found that some parts in it (animation after looking in kinoscope, animation after picking an infusion, etc) are also affected by the driver.

I found that 14.4 (latest as of this date) and 14.4-RC (beta) both have the same issue. I had Wolfenstein crashing every once a while with 13.9, so I updated to 14.4. Bad mistake. 13.9, at least I got 30-60 FPS and every once a while the game would hang. Given a choice between 10 seconds per fps (especially in a FPS shooting game.. no brainer) and 30-60 FPS and a crash once a while (usually after the savepoint, during an animation - but restarting allowed me to see the movie, and continue) - I guess picking the lesser evil until this is fixed is the crash and restart as opposed to not being able to play the game at all.

As I said before, this also affects Bioshock Infinite. It seems that Bioshock Infinite uses something for certain animations - that wolfenstein uses for normal game play - that is affected by the driver version. Again, this issue seems highly hardware dependent. I've read people with later version of video cards that dont have this issue. So I'm posting this for the people who have the same issue as me.

Bottom Line: If the latest drivers dont work, try downgrading.

And for those who know what you are doing, and use windows 7 (I have not tried this in any other version) do this:
1.) Download 13.9 from AMD.
2.) I recommend uninstalling the drivers via hardware manager.. I.e. goto video card, then remove drivers.
3.) When the screen goes blank, hit the power button.
4.) Wait for computer to turn off.
5.) Turn it on. You will start up using basic video drivers.
6.) When you see hardware discovery looking in windows update - you will see an icon in the taskbar - click on it to open it up, then cancel. You dont want to download the latest drivers, and microsoft might do that.
7.) Run the setup for 13.9 and pick custom, then install the drivers. Reboot.
8.) You will have to redo your settings.

The reason why I did it that way was I uninstalled the drivers, rebooted, and discovered it was still using the latest ones because windows "saved" it. So I had to force windows to remove it.

My rig:
AMD Radeon HD 5800 Series - PCI Express 2.0 x16
Asus Maximus VI Hero motherboard w/ i7-4770K @ 3.50GHz cpu and 16GB DDR3 ram running at 2.4GHz. Not using SSD, dont have to.

And the irony is that even though my video card is a "bit" dated, it can still run most games just fine. As long as I dont update to the latest drivers. I dont know who dropped the ball here - AMD or Wolfenstein.

Hope this helps some people out there.

[noah]

Wanted to update this. I had some issues with Bioshock but not Wolfenstein. So I decided to uninstall the HDMI Audio Driver. That fixed my issues. So anybody else out there with the same series video card that has a similiar problem? Even if you dont have the same series but have a similair problem, try uninstalling the hdmi audio driver, does that fix your issue?