[gamegpu] Dragon Age Inquisition performance

[JoeRambo]

Hey,can anybody with a monster rig,since I see you having those,check out if this still gives you any benefit at all??
Would be very interesting.
Basically you have to lower the games priority to background or even idle and you get a nice boost,at least for me that was the case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tlm2guF4nxk

He is running on dual core with smaller L3 cache and no HT, so no wonder there are artifacts and side effects?

Given BF4 stuff like

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=35748631&postcount=23

it's no wonder that same engine based game is sensitive to CPU scheduling in OS.

 

[AtenRa]

Hey,can anybody with a monster rig,since I see you having those,check out if this still gives you any benefit at all??
Would be very interesting.
Basically you have to lower the games priority to background or even idle and you get a nice boost,at least for me that was the case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tlm2guF4nxk

With a Core i7 3770K @ 4.44GHz and HD7950@1GHz im completely GPU limited with Mantle. Changing the priority doesnt affect the performance.

 

[Red Hawk]

Hey,can anybody with a monster rig,since I see you having those,check out if this still gives you any benefit at all??
Would be very interesting.
Basically you have to lower the games priority to background or even idle and you get a nice boost,at least for me that was the case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tlm2guF4nxk

...sounds like an awful idea to me.

Dude's playing on a dual core CPU (without hyperthreading), and integrated graphics. A setup that is altogether far below the game's minimum requirements. You need to hack the game to make it run on dual core machines in the first place! The display there says the game has 3 "job threads". It may be the case that by lowering the priority on one of the threads, more CPU time is freed up for another, granting (in that moment) a frame rate boost. There's no telling what situations would cause the low-priority thread to need more power and cause the frame rate to tank again, though. I'd guess there would be no actual benefit on PCs with proper quad core CPUs. On hardware like this that's not nearly officially supported by the game to begin with, it "boosts" the game from "completely unplayable slideshow on fugly low settings" to "slightly less than completely unplayable slideshow on fugly low settings".

And those pictures in the video. Dude should pony up money for an actual gaming PC before he has the right to be condescending toward programmers. There is no excuse for not having proper hardware to play PC games on.

 

[TheELF]

The display there says the game has 3 "job threads". It may be the case that by lowering the priority on one of the threads, more CPU time is freed up for another

Priority is lowered for the whole game, that's all threads,and since people with killer rigs complain about drops I thought they should check this out so that they could tell us,if it makes a difference in situations where they have drops than its obvious that the programming is crap.

Of course if you are playing with settings that leave you gpu limited than you won't have any benefits.
GPU load in the video is about ~40-50%

 

[psolord]

Regarding cpu importance in this game, I did the following tests.

(spicy wallpaper alert)

Dragon Age Inquisition 1920x1080 custom Ultra GTX 970 @1.5Ghz Core i5 2500k @4.8GHz - 70fps

Dragon Age Inquisition 1920X1080 Custom Ultra GTX 970 @1.5Ghz Q9550 @4GHz - 48fps

347.71 for the Q9550, 347.25 for the i5 2500k, same settings (ultra minus msaa), same game version

Also side by side comparison (2500k on the left)

 

[Deders]

Is that the ultra preset or have the tesselation/textures/post processing been turned up a notch from ultra?

 

[psolord]

Just the default ultra preset my friend minus msaa.

I will do a maxed out version, for comparisons with future cards, but that is a story for another time.

 

[AtenRa]

Regarding cpu importance in this game, I did the following tests.

(spicy wallpaper alert)

Dragon Age Inquisition 1920x1080 custom Ultra GTX 970 @1.5Ghz Core i5 2500k @4.8GHz - 70fps

Dragon Age Inquisition 1920X1080 Custom Ultra GTX 970 @1.5Ghz Q9550 @4GHz - 48fps

347.71 for the Q9550, 347.25 for the i5 2500k, same settings (ultra minus msaa), same game version

Also side by side comparison (2500k on the left)

Core i7 3770K @ 4.44GHz
HD 7950 @ 1GHz GPU , 5000MHz Memory
Catalyst 14:12 Omega

At the same settings (with Mantle), i have lower avg fps than your Q9550 + GTX970.

 

[Red Hawk]

Just upgraded to a 290X, ran a quick test for the effect of Mantle once the GPU bottleneck has been alleviated and it's more of a CPU bottleneck.

Running my 2500K at 3.7 GHz, using the in-game frame rate counter (calling up the console with ~ and typing "Perfoverlay.Drawfps 1"), every graphics setting maxed except for MSAA, I would get a frame rate in the 30s with DirectX 11 walking around the Hinterlands Crossroads, a very NPC-heavy area of the game. Switching to Mantle improve the frame rate to the 50s.

Edit: Also, now having had the chance to actually test the game with more than 2 GB of video RAM...yes, the game does use more than 2 GB, rather easily really. Walking around Haven with everything maxed except MSAA, RAM use hit around 2500 MB (measured by the game's own RAM monitor, brought up by entering "render.drawscreeninfo" into the console). Maxing MSAA up to 4x (and turning post process AA off) brought it up to almost 2900.

I still maintain that 2 GB is enough if you want visual parity with the Xbox One or PS4. But if you want to eke out all the visual quality possible from the game, then you definitely want a graphics card with at least 3 GB, preferably 4.