'Dragon Age Inqusition' is Unplayable! - Bizarre low frame rates and 100% CPU/RAM use - Please help!

I've been patiently waiting for 'Inquisition' to be released for such a long time now. I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited for a release. Yet after a disastrous time trying to sync Keep with my save games and a non-functional billing system on Origin, I still managed to finally pre-order the game and get Keep working. But that wasn’t the end of it. For the last two or three hours I have been trying to no avail to reach a playable state in ‘Inquisition’.



This is nothing short of bizarre. My computer meets the recommended requirements with ease and has never had such major issues running a game in its lifetime. My computer makes use of an AMD 6300 running at stock speeds and two overclocked AMD 7850s and 8GB of 1600Mhz RAM. In other demanding games such as ‘The Witcher II’, this set up runs with frame rates of 60 or higher consistently on medium to high settings and runs benchmarks such as 3DMark that compete with and often beat the same set ups on the leader boards. Yet for no apparent reason everything goes to hell when I try and run ‘Inquisition’. Admittedly ‘Inquisition’ is now the most demanding game I own in terms of recommended requirements, but there is absolutely no reason why it’s running so poorly on my computer. Even when the game boots the graphs in Task Manager rocket to levels I’ve never even seen before. CPU usage launches to 100% on all six cores and RAM usage goes to about 7.8GB. I’ve literally never seen so much RAM used at the one time. And that’s not even launching from the in game menu, that’s just booting the game itself. Besides the game massively draining the system, there are a multitude of audio glitches in the menu as the game loads, with the soundtrack skipping like a scratched CD, awkwardly replaying sections and at times cutting out entirely. I end up with a loading screen that lasts anywhere between two and three minutes with even the little inquisition symbol in the bottom right lagging.



That’s not even when the game actually gets in full swing. Throughout the introductory cutscene where my character is being interrogated, the game slows to nothing short of a picture slideshow that continues throughout the entire scene. Once I’m able to move around things don’t get much better either, with obvious lag and massive frame rate drops that go from about twenty to ten and below. This was on the recommended settings for my computer set by the game itself, which were essentially ‘high’ settings for pretty much everything. Even bumping the game down to ‘medium’ proved useless and only in low was the game actually playable, but even then the frame rate was so bizarrely low that it was completely noticeable. I tired looking up solutions on the internet and implemented the force 60+ frame rate in cutscenes fix, which didn’t improve the cutscenes at all, let alone the rest of the game. I disabled the Origin overlay and even tried playing offline to no avail either. I updated my AMD drivers to the very latest beta drivers that supposedly boost performance for ‘Inquisition’, and admittedly this did help considerably. But the frame rates are clearly still below sixty on AMD Raptr’s suggested settings for my computer. These settings are in fact even lower than the game’s own suggested settings, with Raptr utilising some ‘high’, ‘some’ ‘medium’ and even some ‘low’ settings.



To me this simply doesn’t make any sense. This scenario would be understandable if my specifications didn’t meet the minimum requirements, but for a computer that meets the recommended settings and partially exceeds them there are no excuses. I understand that I’m not going to play the game in ‘ultra’ or maybe even ‘high’ considering the rapid advance of computer technology, but my computer should have no trouble at all playing the game at ‘medium’ at the very least. Yet even on ‘medium’ settings the game is unplayable and unwatchable in both cutscenes and gameplay. Considering ‘The Witcher II’, a pretty demanding game to run even now, and modern benchmarks run on this computer with absolutely no problems whatsoever this situation is nothing short of bizarre.



Is this an issue on my end or is there something dreadfully wrong with the game itself? I’ve read quite a few people’s forum posts complaining of frame rate drops during cutscenes, but nobody seems to be having such major issues. I really would like to play the game as soon as possible, but I’m simply not going to settle for playing the game on the lowest settings possible and with ridiculously low frame rates when my computer should easily be able to run this game smoothly on much higher settings without any issues. Before I start blaming Bioware for anything, could somebody please help me out with this in case there is in fact something curious going on with my computer? If not there’s an extremely serious issue here that is literally making the game unplayable, perhaps for quite a number of players out there.



AMD FX 6300 CPU

8192MB Corsair Vengeance RAM

2x Gigabyte ATI AMD 7850 2GB GPU

Asus M5A99X EVO R2

The game has a very serious memory leak issue and it's weird that still not a single patch released so far. I guess they are busy counting the greens and celebrating the game of the year award.

Did you check your system ram usage? If the game becomes immensely choppy then it's probably it's eating up all your system memory. It's been a while since my last memory leak incident though but when it happens it eats up all of my 16 gigs of ram. And people reporting it's even get to 32 gb level. Very similar that lots of people had after BF4 release. So it's probably the clunky frostbite engine and we need a decent patch.

Just wanted to second the OP's experience with regards to the CPU.

I have a 2.8 GHz triple-core CPU, which isn't a lot of cores but still should be plenty.

All three CPUs are pegged to 100% as soon as I open Dragon Age Inquisitions.

The RAM might be a problem too... if the game ever gets that far. Up to the title screen the RAM is ok, but I haven't gone past the title screen. I've tried using the lowest settings and reducing the resolution significantly. The settings had no effect whatsoever in either direction (neither better nor worse), and the graphics card's temperature looks ok in the Catalyst Control Center, and other games play fine, which makes it seem to me like it's not the GPU. (I'm using an AMD HD 6800.)

Hoping to come across the solution to this somewhere...

i'm pretty sure bioware specifically stated that you needed a quad core AMD OR Intel on the box at min. This game wont even boot on dual cored cpus. It's definitely a heavily threaded game.

as for cpu utilization during boot, this game pegs my 8 core to 100% utilization when booting, i'd be surprised if there is a cpu out there it doesn't redline when booting. during game play cpu utilization is much lower... closer to 40-60%... which means a heavily overclocked amd 4 core should manage without too much problem.

all my settings are ultra+ a few things a little lower (like AA)

Hm, thanks for pointing that out. My graphics setting are as low they go, by the way, with a 720 resolution.

An AMD quad core CPU @ 2.5 GHz is at best - that is, assuming 100% parallelism - 20% faster than a triple core 2.8 GHz. What seems more like a bug to me than a matter of specs is that such a small difference makes the menu screen completely unusable.

still, this game simply doesn't boot on high clocked dual core intels. the number of cores matter, this is a 4 threaded game. if you don't have the cores it simply won't load. modern haswell i3s (2c/4t) clocked at 3.6 ghz can't get this game to boot. the min requirements specifically state "quad core" amd or intel. it doesn't say 3 core phenom II, or 2 core with hyperthreading i3.

I'm sorry you can't get the game to load :\ have you tried unlocking that 3 core phenomII into a quad core. a number of them could unlock that extra core.