Incredible

[mikabee]

With the hacked drivers, playing HL2 I get mostly 100 FPS, sometimes more, sometimes down to 70.
Without, between 10 and 20 FPS and it's almost unplayable and the screen stops for 1/10th second intermitantly.
Overclocking doesn't give a huge boost.
This is on a 9500 non-pro with Catalyst 4.9. I will try the new one later.

Why does it make such a huge difference?

[wazzledoozle]

With the hacked drivers, playing HL2 I get mostly 100 FPS, sometimes more, sometimes down to 70.
Without, between 10 and 20 FPS and it's almost unplayable and the screen stops for 1/10th second intermitantly.
Overclocking doesn't give a huge boost.
This is on a 9500 non-pro with Catalyst 4.9. I will try the new one later.

Why does it make such a huge difference?
Which non-hacked drivers are you using?

[Nobru_rv]

It seems that when he uses catalyst original (4pipes) he get low fps (understandable) and when he uses softmodded drivers he open 4 more pipes and then ge gets 100fps(also understandable). But i cannot understand how he gets 10-20 fps.Thats the problem. If he plays at 1024/768 he should play it very good.

[mikabee]

Which non-hacked drivers are you using?

I forgot to mention.
It's 5.1 from ATI for Win2k
I think my res was 1024x 9xx, no FSAA, everything else turned up to max quality. In Window.

I tried hacked 5.1 and there is a very noticeable drop in performance. Sometimes down to 23 FPS.
Usually hangs around 4x FPS, sommetimes drops to 3x FPS, sometimes up to 6x FPS

I know that it's ATI's fault. I have noticed that newer drivers always make old hw run slower.