Dragon Age Inquisition poor performance

[silver6kraid]

I've been playing Dragon age Inquisition for the past week and I've been plagued by all kinds of performance problems. The game is really choppy when loading in and would even cause sound loops when I have it set to Direct3D 11. After initial loading the game runs smooth but any transition to a new area is brutal. Heck, the title screen has these issues. I get sound loops when the EA and Bioware logos show up and the main menu struggles to load before finally catching up. This is especially distracting when it transitions into a cut scenes and its freezes and there are the aforementioned sound loops. I switched it over to AMD's Mantle settings and that helped with the transitions. However, the game runs considerably poorly throughout. Choppy frame rate and it struggles with combat. Especially when a lot is happening. I can't figure out how to do this. I have read that a lot of people are running this well so I'd like to know if I can fix it. I've already downloaded the latest AMD catalyst beta driver and fixed the 30 FPS cut scene lock. Those both helped but not much. I'm running it on high with the resolution turned down to 1440 x 900 and turning off all post processing and anti-aliasing.

My specs are:

CPU: AMD A10-5800K APU (4x 3.80GHz/4MB L2 Cache)

RAM: 8 GB

Graphics card: AMD Radeon HD 7990 - 6GB

Any ideas on how to get this game running smoothly?

 

[Gam3r01]

Why are you running an A10 and a 7990?

There lies your problems. Its a fairly weak processor for more than entry level gaming, and the 7990 has issues in itself along with being bottlenecked.

 

[MadGamz0r]

If you have an application for overclocking from your motherboard manufacturer test it with higher FSB/CPU clocks.
Turn off all your windows tasks, e.g. Fraps, disable Origin overlay.
Use settings in your C:\Users\%profile%\Documents\BioWare\Dragon Age Inquisition\Save\ ProfileOptions_profile (open this with wordpad)
GstRender.MotionBlur 0.000000
GstRender.MotionBlurEnabled 0
GstRender.AnisotropicFilter 1
GstRender.AntiAliasingDeferred 0
GstRender.AntiAliasingPost 0
Save your file.
Go ingame and load a save, turn down your effects (to nothing if you have to). If CPU<>VRAM is issue, set these in BIOS, inspect HT.
High texture causes lag loading and buffering.. Too aggressive settings still?
Turn off any other Post processing to see if it helps you out.
Run game on Medium all rest other than Texture Quality. If you find your disk swapping a lot during choppy audio/cutscenes, try fixing a swap file size or set a ramdrive (when not overclocking) for your pagefile.sys

Amazingly when I had 8GB and similar problem 9590 with ripjaws CL8 and R290 I bought another 16GB (24 total) and system swap issues stopped outright, from 45fps up to 86 fps average in the benchmark. Unbelievable! First time ever having increased RAM made a difference to ingame performance. I spent 2 days initially concluding some ram bottleneck. Check your beta vid driver is 14.11 latest.

HTH Cheers.
-MadGamzor

 

[maxalge]

Why are you running an A10 and a 7990?

There lies your problems. Its a fairly weak processor for more than entry level gaming, and the 7990 has issues in itself along with being bottlenecked.

Must be a misstype... Has to be a 7970... Otherwise man someone gave him some terrible advice.

 

[silver6kraid]

Its a 7990, didn't realize there was a potential bottleneck. This is my first PC I've ever built so I didn't completely know what I was doing. Any suggestions for a better CPU? Because I feared the CPU was the problem all along. Hell I recently upgraded my RAM because I thought that was the problem. 16 GB and still laggy frame rate when I load in with sound loops. annoying part is after a few seconds its smooth on ultra. Just loading in is the problem.

 

[hang-the-9]

A10 is not that bad of a CPU but it's not very good for the money since its designed for use in systems without an add-on video card. And it's definately not good enough to run with a 7990 at all.

See if overclocking will help.

If it does not, you can go up to a FX 8350 but make sure your motherboard will run it. The FX 6300 is also better and overclocks better than the A10 but it's a bit of a marginal incrase and not really worth the money.

If the issue is only with loading though, I would not worry too much about it unless that annoyance is worth spending another $130 on a CPU.

Also what power supply do you have? You may have issues with stable power with that card if you got one based on price like you did with the CPU.

 

[silver6kraid]

My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-F2A85X-UP4. Also, I have a 750 watt power supply, so I don't think power is an issue. Truth be told I'm not sure how to overclock my processor. Is that really good for it or will it not hurt anything...Also can you tell I'm relatively new to PC gaming?

 

[maxalge]

My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-F2A85X-UP4. Also, I have a 750 watt power supply, so I don't think power is an issue. Truth be told I'm not sure how to overclock my processor. Is that really good for it or will it not hurt anything...Also can you tell I'm relatively new to PC gaming?

Overclocking will benefit you a lot.

And it is quite safe if you do the homework and take your time. My cpu has been at 4.4ghz since release day no issues.


http://www.ocinside.de/go_e.html?http://www.ocinside.de/html/workshop/amd_fm2_overclock.html


Before you begin you are going to need a good aftermarket cpu cooler.

good luck~

 

[Halorath]

I'm getting 50-60 fps on ultra settings and at times it dips down to 30-40 fps briefly during game play the games menu on the other hand runs smoothly and I'm not experiencing any sound issues in the menu or gameplay with my 7.1 surround sound setup.
My pc specifications are as follows;

OS: Windows 7 SP1 64bit
Motherboard: Asrock FM2A88M Extreme4+
RAM: Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracer DDR3 1866MHz CL9 8GB Dual channel
CPU: AMD A8-6600k APU (Quad core)
GPU: MSI Radeon R9 280x Gaming 6G (OC'd Core clock 1150 MHz, Memory 7000MHz Temperature min - 48, max - 74)
Storage Devices: Seagate Desktop SSHD 2TB, Seagate Expansion Desktop HDD USB 3.0 External 2TB, Crucial M550 SSD 256GB
Seagate Barracuda 320G (SSD backup clone updated monthly)
PSU: Raidmax Hybrid 2 RX-730SS, 730W
Sound system: Creative Inspire T6300 5.1 + Logitech z213 2.1 ( configured for 7.1 surround sound)

I have noticed differences between my SSD and SSHD when playing Dragon age Inquisition on them:
(using the same saved game on both storage devices to compare loading times)

SSD (550 MBp/s):
28 seconds to load the saved game
CPU usage 90% to 100% during the loading screen
GPU usage 0-2.5% usage
Very high stuttering when trying to shift between the 3 cards on the loading screen.
When starting a new game fairly moderate stuttering during cutscenes and light stuttering during dialog scenes

SSHD (130 MBp/s):
49 seconds to load the saved game
CPU usage 12% to 70% during the loading screen
GPU usage 0-2.5% usage
Smooth transition when shifting between the 3 cards on the loading screen.
When starting a new game smooth cutscenes and smooth dialog scenes.

During gameplay on both storage devices my CPU usage is between 70-85% and my GPU usage is between 60-100%, my system ram usage is 3800 - 4500 MB and GPU ram usage is 1500 - 1800 MB

I use HWiNFO64 + RTSS to monitor FPS, CPU usage and temperature, GPU usage (graphic processing unit aka graphics card) and temperature, as well as GPU ram usage and system ram usage. This is displayed at the top left of my screen during the loading screens and gameplay with the game running on fullscreen mode (non-windowed fullscreen mode).

Even later in the game the cutscenes and dialog scenes have a fair bit of stuttering while playing the game on my SSD it seems like the game isn't designed to smooth out loading in the background when running on an SSD and as a result it chokes the CPU causing fps spikes as when loading anything from a storage device it has to go through the CPU before it gets loaded into the ram or graphics card and anything going from the ram to the graphics card or vice versa has to go through the CPU first.

I got to say though the GPU ram usage with this game is very light. On Watch dogs it's up to 10GB of system ram usage and 5.2GB GPU ram usage however that is with the watch dogs E3 patch.


I get this all the time, people correcting me saying my graphics card is 3GB and not 6GB because all 280x cards are 3GB well MSI released a 6GB GDDR5 one: http://www.msi.com/product/vga/R9_280X_GAMING_6G.html#hero-overview

 

[andre_888]

I have a similar setup to play Dragon Age Inquisition :

A10-5880k @ 4.4GHz
Gigabyte A88x FM2+ Motherboard
8GB DDR3-2133MHz
NB @ 2100MHz
Powercolor R9 290X 975MHz (stock) 4GB GDDR5

With the settings on Ultra, I have the following results from the in-game benchmark at 1600x900:
DirectX 11 API : Average 36.9 FPS - Minimum 12.9 FPS
Mantle API : Average 57.2 FPS - Minimum 56.1 FPS

The GPU temp stays around 71C, however I am surprised that the CPU goes up to 65C. It idles around 32C.