Tomb Raider Angel Of Darkness, ATI 9000 & Catalyst 3.7

[prime2003]

Hi,
I have ATI 9000 (non pro) and I have installed catalyst 3.7 drivers recently. DX8 titles run the same as before. However, it seems to me that they have lower performance than catalyst 3.6 at least in Tomb Raider Angel Of Darkness which is DX9 game as you know.

In release notes ATI says something about decreased performance for DX8 cards but it says that only code creatures benchmark is affected. I was wondering can someone with similar hardware (DX8 card) test catalyst 3.6 and 3.7 and confirm or deny this?

I have tried it myself with the latest patch (v49) for Tomb Raider which enables benchmarking the game but the results are not consistent. Btw, they recommend prague3 level for benchmarking.
Anyway, the difference I got was about 4fps (38 .vs. 34 fps) which is roughly 12% but that is for the average frame rate.

Completely unrelated to this question is a problem I have with this card. I can play DX8 games for hours without any problems but DX9 games like TRAOD or Raven Shield sometimes crash my computer (blue screen mentioning ATI driver). I even did a fresh install of XPSP1+DX9.0b+catalyst 3.7 and all relevant chipset drivers (i845) but it still happens sometimes. Is that the game (I always have the latest patch), the driver (I keep them updated too) or the card is perhaps broken? Is there any software tool that can test the card thoroughly?
Thanks,
Prime