Catalyst drivers stink!

To start off I should say I have the Radeon x1600 pro.Today I updated the drivers to 7.4 and nothing improved. It seems that with every update the performance drops. Before I had 6.7 installed because anything 7 or above would crash STALKER after about 5 seconds of 1 frame per lifetime gameplay. With 6.7 I ran Call of Duty 2 fine on the highest settings and AA but with 7.4 the same settings slowed to a crawl. And that%26#39;s just one example. THe only bonus was a -slight- increase in FPS with Spider-man 3. Does anyone else with a similar card experience this? And I wonder if I should just stick with the original catalyst drivers included on the CD that came with the video card. So now I%26#39;m going to find which version is the ideal one. Catalyst drivers stink!
http://www.omegadrivers.net/ati/win2k_xp.php ;)Catalyst drivers stink!
hmmm ok, but has it helped you a lot? did you have the same experience with newer drivers that I had?
It was like that when I had a 9800Pro... I thought they would have improved by now, guess not.
Well I%26#39;ve been doing a lot of testing with a lot of different drivers and I%26#39;ve gotten mixed results all around. For now I%26#39;ll stick with the latest Omega drivers, or maybe switch to the 6.7 omega drivers in the future. I%26#39;ve also though about switching to nVidia. Maybe they have some more consistency in their driver releases.
Ive had no problems with any of the drivers since september of 06.
[QUOTE=''Vuud'']Before I had 6.7 installed because anything 7 or above would crash STALKER after about 5 seconds of 1 frame per lifetime gameplay.  [/QUOTE]I played Stalker without any problem with catalyst 7.1. It gets very slow only if I enable dynamic lighting. I%26#39;ve never had video driver problems with my 9800 pro and x800xl.

I hope you did your reading ''Catalyst 7.4 does not support X1600 Pro with HDMI, please continue to use Catalyst 7.3.''
I run an x1900 crossfire setup in my desktop and a FireGL v5200 in my laptop; I%26#39;ve never had any trouble with any of ATI%26#39;s drivers; they are fantastic.
[QUOTE=''MondoCool'']I hope you did your reading ''Catalyst 7.4 does not support X1600 Pro with HDMI, please continue to use Catalyst 7.3.''[/QUOTE]Durrr, ok I didn%26#39;t see that in the release notes. But believe me, 7.3 was just as bad. I remember everyone on the STALKER board hoping 7.3 would help the crappy performance with their cards but it did the opposite. 
[QUOTE=''Vuud''][QUOTE=''MondoCool'']I hope you did your reading ''Catalyst 7.4 does not support X1600 Pro with HDMI, please continue to use Catalyst 7.3.''[/QUOTE]Durrr, ok I didn%26#39;t see that in the release notes. But believe me, 7.3 was just as bad. I remember everyone on the STALKER board hoping 7.3 would help the crappy performance with their cards but it did the opposite. [/QUOTE]Your avatar shows your expression to my post :) oh and 7.3 drivers running great here I havn%26#39;t seen any performance drops.