Inexplicably bad performance

[laserbones]

I recently got a 'slightly used' Sapphire R9 290x 4gb video card for my i7-3820 cpu @3.60 GHz. My CPU is no slouch and this card is supposed to be a beast but when I try to run Team Fortress 2 on max settings, it lags so much that its unplayable and I have to turn quite a few settings down for it to run smoothly. I have been able to play Shadow of Mordor and Thief on ultra, and those games have much better graphics. I saw a video on youtube of a guy using my same card at 7860x1440 resolution with triple monitors, at 299 fps. He also had an I7 processor... I don't understand why my rig doesn't chew up and spit out a game like TF2. I also have 32GB of kingston high performance RAM. Can anyone help me?

 

[amd4lif3]

make sure you have the latest graphics card drivers (by the way omega drivers are out with r9 290x you will get a 19% increase also should fix any bug) ,furthermore it should have no problem im runing an i5 2500 with 8gb ram and a gtx 560 oc ,and it runs smooth no lag must be a driver issue

 

[laserbones]

make sure you have the latest graphics card drivers (by the way omega drivers are out with r9 290x you will get a 19% increase also should fix any bug) ,furthermore it should have no problem im runing an i5 2500 with 8gb ram and a gtx 560 oc ,and it runs smooth no lag must be a driver issue

Thats the thing this is after I downloaded them. I used the new AMD Gaming Evolved GUI thing and picked the suggested optimum settings for TF2, and it was unplayable. It doesn't seem to make sense.

 

[amd4lif3]

uninstall all amd drivers and install them specifically yourself it may be that the auto reccomendation was wrong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIyhIZy_jwk

 

[snowctrl]

Use GPU-Z to make sure your card is not getting too hot and throttling

 

[laserbones]

Ok I uninstalled the catalyst and omega drivers and now the game bounces around at 100-300 fps much smoother! Those drivers were somehow limiting my performance, the opposite of what they were supposed to do... could it be that its an old game? Not sure why that would happen but now I have to uninstall them everytime if I want the best TF2 experience...