Dragon Age 2 Related hardware

katonkyuubi

So,i just bought a new pc whit Sandy Bridge core i7 2600 3,4 mhz,8gb ram and geforce gtx 460,i run crysis 2 lost planet 2 whit a lot of fps,but,i installed dragon age 2 ,put everything on max,and i lag,terribly,is it Bug or my pc spec just ain't too fucking epic?

Cleffy

Its poor coding.  This may shock you, but most games are badly coded.  Most good programers tend to not work on games because the pay is good elsewhere.

Ausare

Game was under funded...cheaply made...with poor design...you got suckered.

Ridelynn

In the case of DA2, it's nVidia drivers. This game runs horribly on nVidia cards, even with the newer Beta drivers. It performs twice as well on AMD hardware. The 460 is not a bad video card, all in all, it's just this one game that no nVidia card runs very well.

Many people get around this by using DX9 on nVidia hardware, I hear it plays a lot better (but you lose out on some of the cool DX11 stuff).

Try the beta drivers that nVidia has (270.51 Beta, available on nVidia's driver download page), they were made just for DA2. They do help some, but won't perform miracles I'm afraid.

Quizzical

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/03/28/dragon_age_2_gameplay_performance_review

When a Radeon HD 6870 beats a GeForce GTX 580, that's a very favorable result for AMD.  Maybe the game just doesn't like Nvidia's architecture, or maybe it's something amiss with drivers that they can fix.  Some games do skew one way or the other.  For example F1 2010 favors AMD, while Lost Planet 2 favors Nvidia.  Dragon Age 2 currently favors AMD.

Of course, sometimes the skew changes with time.  Metro 2033 used to heavily favor Nvidia cards, but now favors AMD somewhat.  Actually, what it really favors is massive amounts of video memory, and AMD has transitioned from 1 GB to 2 GB at the high end, which caused the shift.

Loke666

Dragon age 2 is not exactly Biowares best game, the plot is just so so and few of the characters are memorable.

However don't I have any problems whatsoever with lag. That of course does not mean you don't have it and while it is possible that it is Biowares fault, lets try out the basics.

I BTW have slower processor than you but better GFX card (AMD Phnmn 2 3,2 x6, 480 GTX, 8 Gb ram), even if I have SSDs instead of SATA drives should the performance not differ that much.

If I state the obvious, please ignore it but better safe than sorry.

First of all: Do you have the latest Nvidia drivers? That actuqally can be a big deal, go onto Nvidia.com and download the latests.

Secondly: Try to close down all non essential programs. It is easy to get all kinds of crap, from winamp agent to yahoo toolbar that starts up wiyh your computer. That might slow it down a lot and even games that workrd fine a little while ago might start to lag. Take them off the startup menu.

Thirdly: Check your computer from malware and viruses. Add aware from lavasoft is free, run it. Also try a online virusscanner (your installed might be compromised). I recommend: http://housecall.trendmicro.com/, it have helped me a few times in the past.

Fourth: Always keep 10% of your system drive free unless you have SSD. 

These 4 points are easy and helps to run your computer as well as possible. The most common reason for lag in single player game is that you have to much background junk.

If they don't work you will have to tweak the setting of the game but it really shouldn't be neccesarily with you computer.

Do the GFX cards fan start to sound a lot when you play? Any bluescreens or similar problems lately?

And no, I am not defending this game, I am just trying to help you run it as good as possible (and any other game for that matter).

Good luck.

Loke666

Originally posted by Quizzical

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/03/28/dragon_age_2_gameplay_performance_review

When a Radeon HD 6870 beats a GeForce GTX 580, that's a very favorable result for AMD.  Maybe the game just doesn't like Nvidia's architecture, or maybe it's something amiss with drivers that they can fix.  Some games do skew one way or the other.  For example F1 2010 favors AMD, while Lost Planet 2 favors Nvidia.  Dragon Age 2 currently favors AMD.

Of course, sometimes the skew changes with time.  Metro 2033 used to heavily favor Nvidia cards, but now favors AMD somewhat.  Actually, what it really favors is massive amounts of video memory, and AMD has transitioned from 1 GB to 2 GB at the high end, which caused the shift.

This is rather common and probably something with the drivers. Some games always done better with Nvidia, others with ATI.

And sometimes a new driver fixes the issue. It is of course also often the programer of the games fault.

But he still should have a better performance.

Shinami

First and Foremost, Dragon Age II was developed closely with AMD to make it compatible and optimized with their video cards. Secondly, Nvidia was not allowed anywhere close to optimizing its drivers until a month prior to the game being released where all they got was a DEMO to optimize too.

 

In fact it was the only game on an Nvidia card when set to Very High Settings I saw corrupt graphics. I had to download BETA drivers in order to actually make the game run a lot faster. 

 

Download 270.51 Nvidia drivers and install them.

 

This fixes practically everything for Dragon Age II. 

 

@quizzical.

 

You should have linked the thread starter to the updated article on the matter to the link below:

 

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/04/04/dragon_age_2_performance_followup

 

Although AMD still has more performance, it would have given you more credit to link something up to date than something outdated.