Sudden performance drop on Ubuntu 11.04 with Catalyst

[Newfie]

Using stock Catalyst drivers as shown in Jockey. AMD Radeon HD 6450 512 MB GPU.

I used to do everything on this just fine. Games are now entirely unplayable, and everything feels choppy/laggy. Booting into my Windows 7 partition shows that it is not a hardware problem; I get very good performance with everything on that.

I did not apply any updates or change any settings. I booted up my PC today to find that gaming and other simple things are just downright slow and useless. Rebooting or disabling compiz do not help at all. It was not an update that only appeared now; I usually shut down my PC at night, and I haven't applied any updates recently. This is an entirely fresh problem.

Before, I used to get very smooth gameplay on games such as Quake 4, Quake Live, and Urban Terror. Now, for whatever reason, I can barely play anything. I used to get a consistent 125 FPS on Urban Terror and Quake Live, but now the max I can get is 50 FPS and the mouse feels heavily delayed. This doesn't make sense to me at all; why would it just start behaving like this when I did not change or do anything? Last night I was gaming and doing my normal tasks just fine. I also ran a quick test for OpenArena on PTS; It showed an Average framerate of 58 FPS, while the last time I tried (a few weeks ago) it showed 104. Also, scrolling is laggy even with compiz disabled where it used to work just fine.

To put into comparison...

OpenArena gives me extremely smooth (ingame FPS shows ~200) gameplay on Windows 7. Booting back into Ubuntu 11.04, it shows 40-50 and it's just not playable because of the low FPS plus a "delayed" type feeling when moving the mouse. Minecraft on Windows is giving me 120 FPS, whereas on Ubuntu it's essentially a slideshow. I used to have equal performance between Windows 7 and Ubuntu, and in some cases Ubuntu performed better. But now, my beloved Linux install is pretty much useless for everything.

The Top utility doesn't show any processes that are out of the norm. I just want to know what has happened and how I can fix this. Unless Windows is entirely invulnerable to faulty RAM or something, then I am entirely sure it isn't a hardware issue.

Thanks in advance.


Edit: PTS shows the performance loss...

Before:http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1...IV-URBANTERR48

After: http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1...IV-URBANTERR23

[Newfie]

Found something:

    $ grep WW /var/log/Xorg.0.log
            (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown.
    [    23.941] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic" does not exist.
    [    23.941] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/" does not exist.
    [    23.941] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/" does not exist.
    [    23.941] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi" does not exist.
    [    23.941] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi" does not exist.
    [    23.984] (WW) Falling back to old probe method for fglrx
    [    23.987] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:17:0) found
    [    23.987] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:18:0) found
    [    23.987] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:18:1) found
    [    23.987] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:18:2) found
    [    23.987] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:19:0) found
    [    23.987] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:19:1) found
    [    23.987] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:19:2) found
    [    23.987] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:20:0) found
    [    23.987] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:20:2) found
    [    23.987] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:20:3) found
    [    23.987] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@0:20:4) found
    [    23.987] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@1:0:1) found
    [    23.987] (WW) Falling back to old probe method for vesa
    [    23.987] (WW) Falling back to old probe method for fbdev
    [    24.025] (WW) fglrx(0): board is an unknown third party board, chipset is supported
    [    25.502] (WW) Touch X valuator does not match pointer X valuator, pointer emulation may be incorrect
    [    25.502] (WW) Touch Y valuator does not match pointer Y valuator, pointer emulation may be incorrect

Could this be the issue?