Heres the story...

Got a powercolor HD 4850 PCS+ 2 weeks ago, had some trouble installing it, but got it working eventually. Was getting 25 FPS in crysis. Not bad, but a bit disappointing as most reviews show at least 30-40fps with this card. In heavy battle frame rates where dropping to 12, making the game unplayable. After a while i was getting graphics artifacts (squares) on the screen.

I tried updating the driver again, and realised i was still on an old driver from months ago, despite thinking i had installed drivers when i got the card 2 weeks ago. Okay, so i do a "device manager install" by locating the drivers. This time, it recognises and installs the newer drivers.

Fire up crysis again, and now the frame rate has halfed, and im getting 12fps. Downloaded the very latest drivers (10/12/08), and resatr, and all i get is a blue screen with a sys32k error. Along with the graphics artifacts i was getting, and poor frame rates/driver install trouble and bsod, must be a faulty card. Sent an RMA request to ebuyer, and got it swapped.

Got the new one today, uninstalled my old drivers completely, did a driversweep, did everything i could to get rid of all traces of the old driver. Tried to install new one. I got an error message, something like "Setup was unable to find components that can be installed on your current machine". Again, this works if i do a device manager install (windows 98 style). But im still getting hideous frame rates in crysis, 12 fps. I reinstalled crysis and updated to version 2.0 instead of 2.1, as someone on another forum said the 2.1 driver has a conflict with ATI. No difference.

So basically, do i just swap this card for an Nvidia? 8800GTS or something... Or do i try a reinstall of windows, maybe i have something dodgy in windows which is messing up the install. I dont know what to do. I know that the hd 4850 is slightly better than the 8800, so i want to keep it if possible.

Any suggestions guys, before i reinstall XP?

XP Pro x64
Phenom Quad 9500+
Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DS5
4GB Crucial Ram
Powercolor HD 4850 PCS+
WD ****** + Seagate hard drives
E-MU 1616M

Fresh format for a start IMO.

Fresh format for a start IMO.

Always a winner. Could be conflicting drivers or software causing all sorts of problems.

You've got a superb card, so I don't think it's worth changing until you've ruled out everything else.

I was having driver install problems when I first got my 4850.. it was because I never removed the existing drivers for my old 2900. Downloaded driver clean,add/remove programs to remove any trace of the old drivers, reinstalled and it worked like a charm. give that a go.

What graphcs setting are you using? You do know you won't have the power to run any sort of AA (Antialiasing) on this game. Only the very highest end cards can.

I'd say do a fresh format and test.

Okay, did a fresh install of windows XP last night. The drivers for my card installed fine now, but im only using 8.11, because 8.12 has bluescreen issues with XP x64. Got warhead for christmas, so i was trying that out. On the mainstream (medium equivalent), im getting between 12-40 fps depending on where i look. This is with no AA. Sometimes the game is almost unplayable. Seems pretty poor to me, as mostly im getting around 20 fps with just mainstream settings? Surely the card is capable of more than this. Or is there some other bottleneck on my PC...

Pretty frustrating, my old X1800XT ran crysis fine in medium settings.

To test the bottle neck at a specifc part go to the part were the FPS is very low (i.e 12 fps).

Then reduce the resolution (to 640x480 or 800x600) and if FPS stays same (slow) then you are CPU limited and only a CPU upgrade can get you better FPS.

If you reduce the resolution (to 640x480 or 800x600) and FPS noticabily increases a graphics card increase may give you more performance.

Crysis is a hog on specs!

Thanks micb. Was running in 1680x1050 in enthusiast, dropped the rest to 800x600, and only gained about 2fps. Looks like ill be upgrading my processor next then.

Have you tried a different OS? It doesn't seem right that a Phenom Quad core is being sniffed at as a slow processor?

I'd say give either vista 64 or xp 32 a go. it's evident that driver support for xp64 is weak.

Crysis/Warhead is CPU limited in some places and graphics limited in other places across the game.

Also Crysis/Crysis Warhead on my setup Vista 64 and 4870x2 really chugged on DX9 mode, I put it to DX10 and it flies!