I just got the Orange Box today and tried a Half Life 2 mod which worked fine on my Radeon but I haven't tried Half Life 2 or Team Fortress itself yet.

Also, having in game community turned on in Steam can cause issues with some games.

I should also note that I was having serious issues with Bellatorus, which I sorted but I've noticed that there is a framerate counter in options menu and sometimes, when I first load Bellatorus that frame rate counter is counting over 300 fps usually followed by a crash. I'm not sure if it is the game that is doing this or if it is my Radeon but silly things going on with your frame rate adjustment might be another thing to consider.

BTW you're not in the safe zone just yet - that setup you have now is psuedo working for you current software combonation. For the next few days I would slowly intall one new program at a time and watch for adverse affects.

Just a reminder that I had absolutely no problems with World of Goo but the moment Penumbra put OpenAL on my system resulted in some corrupted sound bytes in World of Goo.

Not that OpenAL is bad because it actually does nicely for Penumbra but some of the drivers intended for specific games don't do so well with some others.

I hope this isn't yet another plot where the protagonist finally gets to the end and finds out that they're in hell.

But the Island of Dr. Monreau hidden mutant research facility has been done too many times too.

Yeah, the gameplay actually is unique, or at least not done to often, even if the plot is a copy paste.

My favorite Res Evil was 3 because it was more intense having to run from the Nemesis whenever you heard him off in the distance - this has that same kind of freakiness going on.

Call of Cthulu looks to be a lot like Penumbra as well. It got some good reviews and is selling for a mere $10 - Supposedly there's some fire fighting going on in it but most of your time your character is on the lamb and boarding himself behind doors.

Why don't you take your discussion about Penumbra or whatever to your own thread instead of hijacking this one?

I use a 2 years old Catalyst with my HD4850 and all the games (including the new ones) are working fine. Sometimes I get a warning saying that I should update my vga driver but I always ignore them.

been rocking 10.9 with 0 problems but i use 64bit version... other then some games REFUSING to v-sync even when forced it works great!

monthly drivers from ATi are crap... at least every other month they drop a hotfix for there drivers after release.

if nvidia would run cooler than ATI i would support them but... thats like asking jesus to thowdown some borderlands Deathmatch..

Sorry about that, man but we are keeping the topic bumped for ya and I've got more info on the topic from some experimentation just now.

Another thing you want to consider, in some instances, it isn't the card at all. I've just been experiencing crash fests with a patched Clear Sky. Fortunately a friend here, with a different type of card, warned that Clear Sky issues are not the card. It's the game.

Some of those games might be crashing because of your card but others might be crashing because they're broken.

So say you have six games and four are not working. Two can be fixed with updates and settings, one your card will always reject no matter what and the final won't work simply because the game is crap.

But what it tends to look like, before investigation, is that the card is sole cause for all four of those games not working properly.


Also, I'm getting ready to install and run Game Booster again. Told myself I wasn't ever going to run it again because it can tangle some things up after bad crashes but what the program does is temporarily kill a number of system processes running in the background which are not compulsory for your PC to operate while you have a game running.

In the least, it frees up resources, in the most it might switch off a few processes that could be popping up in the background and dropping your game.


EDIT:

Hey, man. One of the errors I often times get is this:

0000000001: 2010-10-29 22:44:59:765 Failed to merge manifest file: C:\Program Files\ATI Technologies\ATI.ACE\skins\ccc-skins.xml with exception: Could not find file 'C:\Program Files\ATI Technologies\ATI.ACE\skins\ccc-skins.xml'.
Error Called by: ATI.ACE.CLI.Foundation.MergeManifest::ReadManifest processID:00460 threadID:( ) domainName:(ccc.exe ) assemblyName:(CLI.Foundation.XManifest, Version=2.0.2886.28885, Culture=neutral

So I manually went and looked in C:\Program Files\ATI Technologies\ATI.ACE\skins

And found and XML document named "Skins" but not "ccc-skins"

So I renamed it to what the manifest file is searching for.

I tried running a game afterwards and nothing blewed all up so, so far - so good.

It appears to be some sort of overlooked typo on ATI's part, however, this is coming from the 6.x drivers and CCC so I'm not sure if that same error has carried over all the way into the most recent drivers.