• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

First time AMD/ATI owner, do I need Catalyst?

S

Sp33dFr33k

2[H]4U
Joined
Apr 20, 2002
Messages
2,481
First time ever owning an AMD/ATI video card. Went to download the drivers and saw I could get the Catalyst Control Center or just the drivers. I typically don't like to load anything I don't need so are the drivers fine or should I install CCC?

Thanks.
 
There are 3rd party programs which replicate the functions of the Catalyst Control Center, but without anything, there will be a lot of options that you might not be able to adjust. If you don't really play any games, that might not be a big deal.
 
If you're going to use MSI afterburner to do any "unofficial" overclocking, I'd recommend that you don't install CCC. If you do, make sure to disable it at startup or it will set your clocks back to default.
 
Aaron11 said:
If you're going to use MSI afterburner to do any "unofficial" overclocking, I'd recommend that you don't install CCC. If you do, make sure to disable it at startup or it will set your clocks back to default.
Click to expand...

I use MSI Afterburner and this is not the case with my setup.

Do you have overdrive enabled/unlocked within the Catalyst Control Center? I do, and it adjusts the settings within the CCC to match my active Afterburner profile automatically.
 
For me, I have found less problems with installing just the drivers only. I have had problems with the "display driver has stopped working and reocovered" when I have the CCC installed on 2 of my 4 computers. Fresh windows 7 installs on both, and everytime I install the catalyst control center it throws up that error, so I started using MSI afterburner yesterday. So far so good :)
 
GotNoRice said:
There are 3rd party programs which replicate the functions of the Catalyst Control Center, but without anything, there will be a lot of options that you might not be able to adjust. If you don't really play any games, that might not be a big deal.
Click to expand...

This machine is only for gaming although I don't feel like I'd need to adjust settings outside of what's offered in the game options.
 
If you want to turn off the crazy default driver settings (like denoise, edge enhancement, dynamic contrast, etc) you do.
 
Thanks for all the info. I went with just the driver for now. Once I have some experience with it I'll see if I notice and flaws with this method.
 
CCC hasn't worked on my computer for about a year now no matter his many times I try to fix it. So I've been running without it even installed and its not been a problem.
 
I did have an experience once with an issue on a system running ATI graphics without CCC. I just installed the driver, but IE pages would be very choppy when scrolling. I verified in Device Manager that the display adapter was ATI and the driver was installed. The only way to fix this was to install CCC along with the driver. I rolled back CCC several times and every time I did the pages would be choppy.

In other cases I've had luck just running the driver. As with anything in technology, YMMV.
 
I use CCC without any issues. Come in handy when needing to tweak certain things.

I also run ATI Tray Tools.
 
bigdogchris said:
I did have an experience once with an issue on a system running ATI graphics without CCC. I just installed the driver, but IE pages would be very choppy when scrolling. I verified in Device Manager that the display adapter was ATI and the driver was installed. The only way to fix this was to install CCC along with the driver. I rolled back CCC several times and every time I did the pages would be choppy.

In other cases I've had luck just running the driver. As with anything in technology, YMMV.
Click to expand...

I have the same problem but with FF4, and it only happens sometimes. Installing CCC now to see if it fixes it.

edit: So far so good, and I really like what they've done with CCC since the last time I used it.
 
Last edited:
I just switched from running Nvidia cards for many years (ever since I retired my Radeon 9800pro) and the fact that the AMD Catalyst Control Panel does not have application profiles just boggles my mind. So I have to disable forced AA and AF globally since The Witcher 2 spazzes out if those settings are forced on.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top