It was the new Catalyst video driver; last friday i updated the 4.12 catalyst driver i had to version 5.2 that was recently released from ATI on 02-09.
Last night, After trying such actions as playing at low settings, tweaking, defrag hard disk, even reinstalling the entire game, with no solution at all, I decided to uninstall the 5.2 video drivers, ran drivercleaner, and installed the old 4.12 driver, and when i started the game the problem was gone, now I'm getting mostly 60 fps (42 in very hard combat time) at 1024x768, with medium quality, and no tweaking at all, I can say i'm very happy with this perfomance.
In the other side i'm very dissapointed about this ATI driver related issue, i was a Nvidia user for about 4 years with no driver problem at all, but i decided to change to ATI mostly for money reasons (ATI 9800 was cheaper than GeForce 5900). I have had heard some odd stories about ATI infamous drivers, now i can say those stories became true for me!!
Well, i won't try to find what was wrong with the drivers, i will just stick to my old 4.12 drivers until a new release, then will try it carefully.
Last night, After trying such actions as playing at low settings, tweaking, defrag hard disk, even reinstalling the entire game, with no solution at all, I decided to uninstall the 5.2 video drivers, ran drivercleaner, and installed the old 4.12 driver, and when i started the game the problem was gone, now I'm getting mostly 60 fps (42 in very hard combat time) at 1024x768, with medium quality, and no tweaking at all, I can say i'm very happy with this perfomance.
In the other side i'm very dissapointed about this ATI driver related issue, i was a Nvidia user for about 4 years with no driver problem at all, but i decided to change to ATI mostly for money reasons (ATI 9800 was cheaper than GeForce 5900). I have had heard some odd stories about ATI infamous drivers, now i can say those stories became true for me!!
Well, i won't try to find what was wrong with the drivers, i will just stick to my old 4.12 drivers until a new release, then will try it carefully.