DragonAge 2 help wanted: fps goes from 90 to 15

[jordonc]

While playing Dragon Age 2 with the 1.04 patch at 1180p, High settings and no AA, I get 70-90 fps when I first start the game. Then after 5-10 minutes of gaming my fps drops down to 10-25 and stays there until I restart the game. It sometimes happens after entering a new area, other times when enemies spawn on-screen, and other times for no apparent reason at all. Using HWmonitor, I know the temps for my cpu and HD 7870 never go over 50c. I've tried to recreate the problem using Unigine's Heaven Benchmark and Mass Effect 3, both with the in-game settings turned as high as they can go, but both work just fine. I have noticed that if I use medium settings and DirectX 9 my fps start above 150 and stay there, so that makes me wonder DirectX 11 is the problem.

This is what I've tried so far:
Reinstalling Dragon Age 2
Wiping my AMD drivers and reinstalling Catalyst 12.8
Turned off power saving features on my cpu
Overclocked both my 15-3570k to 4.0 and HD 7870 to 1100mhz

I've looked through the bioware forum and Tom's already, but couldn't find a problem similar to mine.
I have a i5-3570k, Sapphire HD 7870, 8GB of 1600 RAM, 630W PSU, z77x-ud3H mobo. Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[Alex_83]

Cant help you my highest temps are 50 degrees and got the same card and fps bf3 low is 60 average and on high they are about the same what is wrong? My psu is a modecom 620 watt and cpu is AMD A8-3870K

 

[AntiZig]

check your VRAM utilization. If the FPS drops when it nears 100% then that could be the cause of fps loss. With that said, you mention that the game runs fine with dx9, and problem only occurs in dx11; which leads me to believe that either ati drivers are not up to snuff to run dx11 or there's a memory leak in dx11 engine as opposed to dx9 engine.

 

[jordonc]

check your VRAM utilization. If the FPS drops when it nears 100% then that could be the cause of fps loss. With that said, you mention that the game runs fine with dx9, and problem only occurs in dx11; which leads me to believe that either ati drivers are not up to snuff to run dx11 or there's a memory leak in dx11 engine as opposed to dx9 engine.

Thank you for the suggestions. I checked my VRAM utilization using gup-z and found that my fps does indeed drop when nearing 100%. However, this only applies to using high settings and DirectX 11. When I use DirectX 9 and medium settings with 8x AA, I get close to 100% VRAM utilization and no fps drops.

I guess I'm just looking for confirmation that this is a software/driver problem rather than a defective video card.

 

[AntiZig]

That's all I can think of, because there should be no other reason why that card would not be able to run the game. If you want to be double sure, call up your vendor support and speak with them, if it's a hardware defect they'll tell you to RMA it.

 

[jordonc]

So for some reason last night I was unable to recreate the problem after playing for 30-45 minutes. This time, my VRAM use never even got past 50%, even when I turned up the details to very high with 4x AA. The only thing that I changed was I increased the overclock on the core clock and memory for my HD 7870, so I'm not sure if this had something to do with it. Hopefully the problem has been fixed. I just wish I knew how. If the problem comes up again, I'll call Sapphire. Thanks for your help AntiZig.

 

[jordonc]

Best answer selected by jordonc.