Slow graphics drivers in windows 8 with AMD 6650M

Question

I just upgraded my laptop (Acer Aspire 7750g with AMD Radeon 6650M 2GiB graphics card) to Windows 8, and since my old drivers were incompatible, I downloaded the latest drivers from the Acer website.

These drivers indicated that they supported Windows 8. However, I've been getting very slow framerates in all games, and the Windows Experience Index rated my graphics as a 2.4 (down from 6.7 on Windows 7). So there's obviously a problem.

I've tried installing drivers directly from the AMD site, but the AMD Mobility Radeon notebook drivers (I tried them since my card has the 'M' suffix) say that they're incompatible. I've hit a bit of a dead-end, so I came here to see if anyone else was having the same problem or knew of a solution.

Thank you in advance if you're able to assist.

Answer 1

I suspect that a windows update that was in progress automatically installing some partial drivers ended up corrupting the drivers that you downloaded. I have installed windows 8 a number of times, and despite my carefulness, I myself ended up doing what I just described earlier this month. My result was even worse than yours, in fact. It wouldn't even show anything on the screen except random frames of gibberish about once a second, and I couldn't even use the computer, so I had to the secret safe mode booting of windows 8, and then finish doing all windows updates, and then download new drivers from AMD and install them, after making sure no more windows updates were in progress.

That will be the hard part, locating the right driver at AMD, but when you find it, it will definitely make your computer work. Just make sure that you reboot your computer to install any windows updates that may be in progress BEFORE installing the amd driver, or else it WILL interfere with the new drivers, and could even corrupt the drivers worse than they are right now.