Download something like MSI Afterburner, so you can monitor the GPU clock speeds and usage.

My best guess given your brief description is that you have something with Flash embedded running, with hardware acceleration enabled, which means the GPU would be locked to a lower clock speed.  If that's the case, the simplest solution is to disable hardware acceleration in Flash.

The problem is more so a massive drop in graphics ability, each game I played suffered greatly by whatever this is. My desktop graphics seem crippled, but analysis shows that the games only use about 8% of my computer's capabilities.

It's like I went from a 1 GB graphics card to a 256 MB graphics card, it's incredibly annoying. It happened suddenly, within one restart, and accross every game I play.

If you need additional information please let me know what it is you need to solve this.

I have no idea where to start with MSI. It appears to be at a constant low, regardless of what I do.

i for one will use older catalyst version like 12.4 or 12.6 the newer catalysts did not improve frames per second in any game newer or older..

windows 7 x64 ultimate,phenom 955 ,785g/sb700,Sapphire hd6970,corsair 850 tx

Alright, I'm back. I don't think it's flash at all, that seems silly as I always have background applications such as youtube running in the background, even before the problem.

The problem is that my Graphics card isn't using all of it's resources. I tried to get a better picture with MSI but it just appears with these values almost constant: (even while in games)

Temp: 33 degrees C

GPU usage: 0% 

Fan Speed: 20%

Fan tachometer: 965 RPM / 10,000 RPM

Memory Clock: 150 MHz (the card comes with 1050 MHz)

Memory Usage: 0 MB (the card comes with 1064 MB)

Framerate: 0 FPS

So, from this data it would appear as though my card isn't even being used. I think my brother might've caused a sublight system to override the graphics, such as Intel HD Graphics. 

QUESTIONS: Does Catalyst conflict with Intel HD Graphics? Could motherboard graphics be taking over?

I think I found out what it was... My brother must have accidentally knocked out my HDMI cord while moving my PC or something similar, then plugged the HDMI cord into my motherboard instead of my graphics card. It completely bypassed my graphics card, and Intel HD Graphics took over and so I've been playing games off of my processor and not off of my Graphics Card.

This has been irritating me for 2 months now...

TL:DR Brother plugged cord into wrong slot, Intel stepped in, all fixed. LOL