Title says it all.  I think this is ridiculous.  Every time I end up getting smoked in W@W my entire PC goes down.

System stats:

I have a similiar setup and getting 60-90 fps most of the time all maxed out.  Your'e system is more then enough.  Is your pc crashing, or just crummy performance ?

Overclocking the memory in my experience would crash my pc, I usually don't go past 1020MHZ.

Phenom II 955 @3.5, 4850 crossfired, Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate

That's what my performance is like most of the time too!  Wonderful cards, but this smoke glitch/issue/whathaveyou drives me up the wall!

Unfortunately when this happens my whole system goes down, and it happened even before I OC'd the memory on my GFX cards.

Hmmm, maybe try an older or newer catalyst version.  The power supply looks good, would of been my second guess.

It did this on 9.8, 9.9 and 9.10 drivers.  Though less on 9.9.  Maybe I'll roll back to them.  Also, I've taken everything back down to stock clock rates and this hasn't seemed to help at all so far.

It gets really annoying in GRID too, with it's huge masses of particle and smoke.

Anyone from ATI/AMD have an opinion?

Transparency kills performance on any card even Nvidia ones. The reason is because pixel colours have to be calculated multiple times to get the correct level of transparency.  DirectX 11 has order independant transparency so when more games start using that then there wont be the big performance hit anymore.  Obviously you would need a DX11 card though (along with games that implement this feature)

Game.AMD Administrator