Dragon Age: Inquisition PC Specs

So...my GPU (GTX 680M) is getting up to 94% utilization and sitting at 85-90C whenever I play the prologue.

What settings would you recommend reducing in order to avoid melting my graphics card?

 

None. Simply cap the framerate 5-10FPS below your average. That will lower GPU utilisation. Job done.

 

Is that with max fans and is your GPU OC'd? Did you prop the back of your notebook up?

 

@Cake, you already got the p651sg?! I thought it was releasing in a month??

 

My GPU is indeed overclocked and the fans were maxed out, but I had disabled Vertical Sync which was causing the issues in part. By letting the game shoot up to 180fps in menus, idling on the ability screen was enough to cook my card. Enabling Vsync solved most of my issues; my max temp is now 86, and it occurred only briefly.

Actually, for whatever reason the game pushed my CPU to max out as well, and I had to dig into advanced power settings and limit CPU function to 90% of maximum in order to dodge that bullet.

Regardless, thanks for the advice. This machine is 2.5 years old now and I'm thinking that it's getting close to replacement time, but I'll have to see how it holds up over the next few months before making a decision. Those 980M performance reviews are looking highly appealing right now, though...

 

Maybe a thermal paste re-application would help your temps with that game. But really, propping up the back of the notebook helps so much you wouldn't believe. It's the difference between 89-92 deg on CPU in BF4 and 75-79 deg on CPU.

 

OK, i just ran the game with some tweaked settings on my OC'd 780m and the early in the game it is showing an easy 60fps though I think that'll tank later on. so far my temps seem to settle in the 70 deg C range which sounds about right for FB3.

Currently using the following settings:

Resolution scale: 95%
Graphics Quality: Custom
Mesh Quality: High
Tesselation Quality: Medium
Texture Quality: Fad Touched
Shadow Quality: high
Terrain Quality: high
Vegetation Quality: high
Water Quality: high
PP Quality: high
AO: SSAO
Effects Quality: High
PP AA: Medium (similar to AA Post in BF4)
MSAA: Off (Similar to AA deferred in BF4)

 

Repaste the CPU+GPU and clean your vents.. Your temps will automatically drop.. Your system is still quite good so wait for new NVIDIA cards..

 

Something sounds messed up dude. I have a 680m I haven't seen it go above 69C, I'll double/triple check later though but all-in-all; I never worry about heat.

 

What? I wish! I'm supposed to be getting mine in about 4 weeks time. They're due to receive the SG chassis on the 12th December and promised me a maximum of 3 working days to build it before it's sent out for delivery.

Sent from my Nexus 5

 

the in-game benchmark kinda spazzed out and i don't think the scores it gives are accurate anyway.

 

Yeah, that in-game benchmark went all buggy for me too.

Are the later sections of the game noticeably more demanding than the opening area? Because I'm very happy with performance in that opening section at Ultra settings. Seems too good to be true for the 780M!

 

Towns and villages and some Rifts have performance hits; otherwise the game runs fairly stable I believe. Only gathered from others' reports.

 

Anybody gets the cutscene freeze bug or is it just me? Happens twice at least every day

 

Ugh, 92°C on my GPU. Moan about thin gaming laptops all you like but the fact is, the P35X v3 managed to cool the 980M far better than this bulky fat Clevo cools the 780M! I'll have to cap my framerate somewhere between 30-40FPS. That should allow some nice drops in temperature, I hope.

 

i haven't gotten passed the prologue yet!

 

980Ms run cooler than stock 680Ms, and 780Ms were so hot they had to change the P370SM's heatsink from the CPU sharing a heatpipe with the slave GPU to a 2-pipe CPU heatsink and give the slave a larger heatsink to keep it properly cool.

I'm not sure a valid comparison is to be made there. If you popped a 980M into that Clevo you got, it might run far cooler than the gigabyte managed =3

 

really wish i could get a 980m

 

Yeah, can't wait until next month and my P651SG. I want a 980M again. 780M is too hot. Wah!

Edit: a lock of 40FPS still resulted in 92 degrees on the GPU. I'll try 35FPS. I might just have to run this game non-overclocked. It certainly looks that way. Perhaps it is due a repaste.

 

for some reason the game isn't bounding the mouse to the game's window cos there have been times where i click and it takes the game into a windowed state.

 

I've decided that running non-overclocked is acceptable in this game. That allows me to undervolt the GPU quite a lot and reduce temps drastically. Game still seems to run well above 30FPS at my custom 'everything maxed out except for MSAA' at all times anyway (except in cutscenes where there is some odd stuttering). Good enough until I can get my hands on a 980M again

 

Haha, already missing the precious? Too bad about the wifi card!

 

Nvidia Geforce GTX 980M 8GB DDR5 FOR Clevo Upgrade Monkey | eBay

oh man! i would love to grab this now

 

It's only $700 at RJTech, no idea why you'd grab that for $980

 

oh bookmarked!

they have multiple options....does it really matter which particular model of 980m you get?

 

I was told a Clevo 970M worked in a MSI machine, so I believe it doesn't matter too much, except the vRAM quality. Nobody knows who has bad RAM or not yet though.

 

I wish this game had a few more (longer) hairstyles to choose from. I created my character (always go for female in games when I get the choice because a) it's interesting to step inside the opposite gender's shoes once in a while and b) most games have male protragonists anyways) and something felt... off about her. Couldn't quite place it. Then I realised. It's Commander Shepard! I'd made her to look almost exaclty like my Shepard from my Mass Effect trilogy playthrough. Not because of any real purposeful intention, but because there's like only 5 different hairstyles to choose from if you don't want to be bald or very closely shaved. It's comical, but also feels very dated when the rest of the character models look so damn fine. This game needs more hair. Lots more hair.

 

Xotic sells with killer, shhhh!!

 

Interesting, as soon as i make it to the boss battle in the prologue the fps starts to tank, dropping into the 40s for like a second or 2. there are also some really weird spots where the fps will just tank for no reason - one example is the room you wake up in post closing the breach. There's a window with a chest in front of it across from your bed on the right is a shelf. if i stand where the chest is and look at the window - 60fps. But if I turn the camera to the bookshelf - 43-45fps.

 

Be glad your game didn't have the glitch mind did where my character is referred to by the wrong gender 80% of the time. Also wish I could dye my hair. The character creation screen has weird lighting which made my light brown look considerably darker.

Anyone getting a stable 60FPS with a single GPU at 1080? I've locked the FPS to 30 and set everything to ultra. Keeps temps at 53 degrees (!). That being said, I can't be bothered to fiddle with the settings since so many require a full restart. Game looks great and it keeps it more consistent since cut-scenes are a locked 30 anyway, but I feel like 60 should be within reach. Even the 10% OC I did on my card with MSI isn't helping a huge deal though. Doesn't drop below 40 but I can't keep it above 50 regularly. I can live with drops in the cities where the NPC have a heavy effect on FPS, but it would be nice for the world to be a little smoother.

Also, anyone else getting 2FPS drops when locking to 30? It's mildly annoying. FPS will drop to 27.8 occasionally, and yes, I do have triple buffering forced on.

EDIT: Also, don't use the Prologue as a guide for performance. Dropping everything to high got me a solid 60, minus the boss battle, but I haven't been able to reach that level of performance since.

 

Looks like I'm chucking this down to 30fps!

 

Would anyone care to educate a newbie on how I can setup frame limits? Since my rig seems to get me a steady 35-50fps while heating up, and since I can't tell the difference between 35 and 50 in the heat of the moment, I might as well force things to stay around 40 or so and keep my GPU cool in the process.

It isn't an option in-game, is it? I'll feel pretty stupid if that's the case.

 

Try this. Open notepad and type in the following:

GameTime.MaxVariableFps 40
GstRender.Thread.MaxProcessorCount 8

Then save it and select "all files" and name it "user.cfg" (without quotes). Then put that in DA:I's default folder and see if it works. It does for BF4, so it might do it for this game too seeing as they're on the same engine.

 

Ah, thanks for the info. I ended up trying to be self-reliant and Googled into a solution -- Rivatuner, which comes bundled with MSI Afterburner, offers the ability to add a framerate limit globally or with individual .exe files. With a limit of 40fps, I haven't seen temps above 82C, and the card typically sits between 75 and 80C during normal gameplay, which is perfectly fine in the long run.

 

would be nice if someone did something like that but for overclocking speeds: ie. run some games on overclocked speeds and others at stock.

 

You can do this directly in Origin, Right click on DA:1 -> Game Properties -> Add '-GameTime.MaxSimFps 60 -GameTime.ForceSimRate 60' in Command Line Arguments, without the quotes.

Of course you replace the 60 with whatever number you want.

 

You need a repaste and repading for sure on that GPU...

Yeah probably won't work although Eurocom claim that they have made it work..Alienware has really screwed up this time with the 9 series...

 

Uh, thanks DA:I. Why yes, this is the perfect time to create a checkpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdEhvV4U9QY&feature=youtu.be

 

if i bumped down to 1600x900 (the lowest playable resolution I find acceptable for a 17"-24" display) i may achieve 60fps.

 

seeing random hitching even at 30fps.

 

Most people say the hitching is gone; are you fully up to date on drivers and patches both?

 

yep fully up to date!

 

What could I say... try setting your CPU to 3.5GHz?

 

i've put the overclock setting on in my alienware 17 though i have the stats up as i play and it's only hitting around 3.4GHz on all cores.

 

Wait. You have a 4700MQ. I'm silly, 3.4GHz should be your max OC. That's correct. But if that doesn't work I've no idea what to tell you, man. Sorry.

 

Don't worry, you're not the only one. I see it too.

Sent from my Nexus 5

 

CPU-Z shows it peak to 3.6GHz from time to time. quite strange.

 

Anyone running this game with 980M? Can you share performance results, settings and VRAM usage?

There is a quick way to unlock the cutscene frame rate.
<iframe width='640' height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Q70DxlW0nb0?rel=0" frameborder='0' allowfullscreen=""></iframe>


Also have you tried reducing shadow setting further and disabling MSAA to get above 60fps?

 

That's single-core. Remember, your single core is always +200MHz from your quad, and your dual-core is +100MHz from your quad.

 

ah ok, though it's not hitting 3.5GHz though....just sits at 3.4.