Radeon Driver update broke my game...

**RedEye** · July 08, 2009, 08:53 AM

I know everyone says this but, while I can usually follow a set of instructions, I am definitely not good at technical stuff.

I recently updated the drivers for my old Sapphire Radeon 9500 card to install a new game. The game was rubbish so it turns out to have been irrelevant but it seems to have broken MEII. The game booted but CTDd at both the campaign and battle map. I tried reinstalling in the hope that the game might detect new settings at first start-up but now it crashes to blue screen & comp has to be fully rebooted. TW is my all time favourite PC game, so this is a real loss.

As the card has gone legacy I only have the option of the final driver build or the original driver from disc. Reloading the latter looks like a horrible faff involving identifying and deleting registry keys; which I'm nervous of, having never done this before. Having previously updated to earlier versions; a) there appear to be rather more keys associated with ATI than expected (is this what's meant by a dirty registry?), b) I don't know if what else I might break by rolling back so far (although I'll happily sacrifice any games to have TW back

) and c) I don't know whether the original driver will support the 1400 x 900 display of my current monitor.

Does anyone know if there is a way of fixing the problem without reloading the old driver?

I'm guessing not; in which case can anyone point me to a reliable & straightforward guide to uninstalling / reinstalling the driver which is reasonably risk free? So far the ones I've found seem very complicated.

TIA

**Gigantus** · July 08, 2009, 10:00 AM

There should be a restore point at the date when you installed the new driver. Tried that one?

**RedEye** · July 08, 2009, 10:50 AM

Unfortunately it's before the earliest available restore point - I've come back to the game after quite a break.

However, I have found the following folder - Windows/ATI/SUPPORT/(last known good driver package). The main folder contains a launcher among other files and each of the sub-folders (named BIN, CCC, Driver, SBDrv, WDM_ALL) have setup apps. Presumably this is where the original download unpacked itself to. It would appear that this wasn't deleted at the time of the last update. (There is also a similar folder for the last [bad] update.) If I copy this to the desktop would it be likely to install the driver suite effectively do you think? It would save going back to 2004 version which is what's worrying me.

Also, reviewing ATI's unintsall/install instructions they make no mention of driver & registry cleaning - how important is this to the overall performance?

**Gigantus** · July 08, 2009, 12:24 PM

Best bet: make a restore point now and then install the old driver. Those drivers usually unpack themselves into one of those directories (C:\Nvidia\version_number for example) and then run the main setup file, they will stay there unless uninstalled. The launcher in the main folder should be the one.