6950 not preforming correctly.

[ponyxslayer]

I am making this post on behalf of a friend. His PC is having problems running lots of games even though it should be able to run them.

His computer is only 1 year old and has a i5 2500 and a Sapphire Radeon HD 6950. It has 8 GB of ram and a MSI H67MS-E43 motherboard.

Here are links to GPU-Z and CPU-Z information and 3D Mark 11.
http://i.imgur.com/JX3SS.jpg GPU-Z
http://i.imgur.com/teFr9.jpg CPU-Z
http://3dmark.com/3dm11/4028078 3D mark 11

The computer runs fine until he gets in games. He gets really bad fps in almost all games that are graphically demanding. He can only run Skyrim on Medium, he couldn't run GW2 on High. But in some games like ARMA2 he can get 50fps.
Any ideas of how to fix the problems in some games? His graphics card drives are all up to date.

 

[thilanliyan]

Have you checked the gpu and cpu temperatures?

If the gpu or cpu overheats, they will clock down, giving slower performance.

Has this only started happening recently?

 

[WiseUp216]

Reinstall the drivers from scratch?

 

[RussianSensation]

That 3dMark11 score looks perfectly fine for a 6950.

Not sure about SKYRIM. It should run just fine too. Does he have Super-Sampling or some other form of Anti-aliasing enabled through the control panel by accident? He should leave it on Use Application Settings. Also did he enable Catalyst A.I. See if disabling it changes anything. Tell your friend to check his CPU usage in MSI Afterburner.

That Arma II score also looks normal. HD6950 2GB gets about 48 fps average:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2012/05/10/nvidia-geforce-gtx-670-2gb-review/4

The reason GW2 runs poorly is because it's a driver issue on all AMD cards right now. The game hasn't launched and apparently the GPU usage is often < 50% in the game on some AMD cards. It's still in Beta form:

Your friend can test his GPU usage with MSI Afterburner.

What other games run poorly? Also I am assuming he games at 1080P?

 

[ponyxslayer]

According to that chart the video card my friend is using gets 37 fps. My other friend has the 7850 and that supposedly gets 36 fps. The only problem is my friend with the 6950 was only getting 10 fps. So how come the card meant to get 37 fps gets 10 while the 36 fps card gets around 40?


Other friend has a i5 3570k so I know he has a better cpu, but it shouldn't make the difference of around 30 fps.

What is a good place/tool to get all the driver updates?

Other games that run poorly that I know of are Skyrim. I will ask him for more games that don't run well.

 

[RussianSensation]

You should just get the latest drivers from AMD's website. Catalyst 12.7 Beta are the latest.

http://support.amd.com/us/Pages/AMDSupportHub.aspx

Make sure all the motherboard / chipset drivers are installed. Those are usually found on the manufacturer's website under the specific motherboard.