20 réponses à ce sujet

[Loki42]

Hello,

I have the Steam version of DA:O, and I just decided to start playing it. Unfortunately, when I start the game up, the loading video (of the bloody blade sweeping across the screen) chops and skips horribly. When I hit Esc to skip to the main menu, it is also choppy and the menu options are sluggish to respond.
I've tried dropping every video setting to as low as I can drop them to no effect. I've upgraded my nVidia video drivers to 195 from 191 with no effect.
My CPU and memory usage are at or below 60% when this is happening, so I doubt either of them are an issue.
Nothing I've done has had the slightest effect on this problem, so I'm hoping someone here might have some advice.

My system specs are:
Core 2 Duo @ 2.66G
2G RAM
2x GeForce 8600 GTS in SLI
On-board Creative X-Fi Xtreme Audio

Any help is very appreciated, thanks!

Modifié par Loki42, 29 novembre 2009 - 05:12 .

[Loki42]

Quick update, I've updated my audio drivers to no effect, and I reinstalled the DA:O Character Creator to see if it showed the same problem. It does not. The problem only affects the released game.

[Gorath Alpha]

The Character Creator cannot reflect game performance, and wasn't intended to do so.  A great many owners of Geforce 8600s are having trouble with video drivers (in this game).  You'll just have to test as many of them as you can.  Start with the lowest numbered driver set from the 190.xx series and work up from there slowly. 

Gorath
-

[Creesen]

tag

[Loki42]

Ugh, I was hoping to avoid video driver roulette, as for some reason up/downgrading video drivers on my system takes about 20 mins apiece. I'll give it a shot though.

I've seen a few other people on the forums say that the 186 drivers worked, so I'll just jump to them.

[Loki42]

Well, downgrading to 186.18 causes DA:O to crash on load. Upgrading to 190.38 does not stop the crash. Old drivers are seeming to make it worse. =(

I don't have any more time today to mess with drivers, but I'll keep trying. Any other suggestions are welcome!

[Loki42]

Okay, I think I've got this figured out. Turns out that 2x AA got turned on sometime during the driver shuffle and that was causing the crash on load.

After disabling that, 186 and 191 drivers appear to play the game properly.

Hopefully someday Bioware will patch all this...crashing with AA enabled on 5 different driver revs is pretty terrible.

[Loki42]

So I finally decided to give DA:O another shot. I'm still running nVidia drivers 191.07 as they are the only drivers that seem to give remotely sane framerates. I actually tried starting a game this time, and the game is completely unplayable. I am getting probably about 5 FPS, with all graphics options disabled, and the rez set at 800x600.

I'm loathe to try the 195.62 drivers, as they were what I was running when I first made this post, and they were even worse (being able to click Exit on the game menu took about 30 seconds due to lag). Does anyone have ANY ideas/suggestions/help on this?

I feel like I've taken $70 and thrown it in the trash.

[boglavs]

Since i'm able to play the game on a weaker computer (laptop intel 2.1 dual core, 8600m gt), i believe you should be able to play it properly. I'm on driver 182.50 and with med\\high set., fb on, 1024x768 get around 25+ fps. You could try to disable SLI and if that doesn't work reinstall the OS.

Windows XP would give you the best performance for sure.

[Herethos]

The 195.62 drivers works fine for me in windows 7 32x with DA:O(Retail) but the performance could be better imo, its kind of choppy already in Ostagar especially when looking around. While in winxp sp3 with 177.xx or 174-175.xx drivers I don't remember exactly, it runs silky smooth in comparison. I have a Geforce 8800 GT (512mb). I'm thinking of trying the 180ish drivers for windows 7 or pre 190 atleast, I don't think there are earlier drivers available.



A laptop with Vista and a 8600M GT (256mb) using Forceware 176.44 drivers is running DA:O (Digital Deluxe Version) very smoothly as well even in heavy combat. And it has less than half the memory bandwidth, and the pixel/texture fillrates are nowehere close compared to the 8800. Yet it runs more smoothly. So I suspect there is something fishy with the drivers, probably all that Cuda, PhysX, DirectCompute support which the later drivers have, while the 176.44 has none of that or its disabled (physx atleast I usually set it to disabled in the drivers when I can). Only other differences I can think of except the OS itself is the Direct-X versions, Windows 7 uses Direct-X 11, Vista 10, and Windows XP uses 9 something. But I don't think that should matter much unless the game can take advantage of the other/extra dx features.

[Loki42]

Okay, that makes some sense, and its nice to hear from someone that has similar hardware that they are able to play it. I tried disabling PhysX and such on my 18x.xx drivers, to no effect, so I tried rolling back to 178.24 like Herethos is running, and sadly, no change. My game is still getting only about 5FPS or so.

I doubt an OS reinstall would help, as I'm able to play any other game I have at the expected and normal framerate.

[Loki42]

Okay, so after getting tired of messing with this, I decided it was time for an upgrade, and bought a brand new nVidia GTX 260. It's now installed and providing excellent performance, in every game EXCEPT Dragon Age. I still have the screwed up choppy intro movie, and in-game, at 1920x1200 Low graphics options, the game chops like I'm running it on a PoS. Of course, i'm running the latest nVidia drivers with this new video card.

This is DEFINITELY not a video card/driver problem. I'm now almost $300 spent into trying to play this game with no luck. Why the hell is there no official support from EA/Bioware on this?

[Loki42]

*bump* Does anyone have any ideas?



Maybe someone from Bio/EA?

[Herethos]

Try a clean boot and see if it works better (might have to manually start daoupdater service afterwards) http://support.microsoft.com/kb/331796

If you have steam version try disabling ingame community service in steam settings then ingame tag.

Try going into daoconfiguration program and disable all sound and see if it runs smoothly if it does its probably a problem with onboard sound and the game.



Some other causes:

Cinematics Choppy and out of Sync

http://social.biowar...322686/1#491971

"Why are all the cinematics out of sync and choppy as hell? The rest of

the game is smooth as can be at some pretty high settings for a barely beating recommended req computer. I remember

when starting the game the first few times there was some popup

regarding ffdshow or something like that, told it to turn it on and

stop bothering me. Now I can't find a way to turn that off if this is

what's causing the cinematics to desync and get choppy. The video feed

itself chops up, freezes, and winds up lagging way behind the auto

track.

Since it seems the DA:O will make use of the ffdshow codecs for example instead of default codecs if you have them installed. So by that assumption it could use others as well if they're available and that can cause problems too, if it uses filters/splitters/codecs from nero, cyberlink, even from onboard modems to play the sound etc.

A quick fix I guess is to just reinstall direct-x and the windows media player codecs that should reset the priorities.



Worth a read I guess its regards to another game(I have it on steam) which was later fixed with a patch, but its well written but same basics apply: http://forum.egosoft...ic.php?t=113628

Basic Pre-Requisites(Be sure these are handled before proceeding):

It is imperative that you rule out all other possible issues before proceeding to assume codec’s to be your only issue.

Use Driver Cleaner and get latest drivers for your video card and sound card.

Reinstall DirectX9c from the game CD/DVD and Media Player 10 from Microsoft.

Download latest motherboard drivers this can be very crucial especially with onboard sound cards.

If you have built-in onboard sound, just know that latency issues may affect performance at the very least.

This might not apply if you have other OS than Windows XP. I'm not sure if these issues are fixed in Windows Vista/Windows 7 or even possible.

[dakkon10]

Have you tried uninstalling/reinstalling the game? annoying I know but may be worth a try.

Or maybe possibly upgrading sound drivers if theres one available. I Have a pretty high end system(I like to think), and I get choppy audio a lot, which also seems to screw up the video sometimes as well.

[Loki42]

Herethos wrote...

Try a clean boot and see if it works better (might have to manually start daoupdater service afterwards) http://support.microsoft.com/kb/331796
If you have steam version try disabling ingame community service in steam settings then ingame tag.
Try going into daoconfiguration program and disable all sound and see if it runs smoothly if it does its probably a problem with onboard sound and the game.

This actually turned out to help me find the problem. Turns out that the 3DM2 software that manages my 3ware RAID card is the culprit. If I stop the service, the game runs like silk, even with maxed graphics settings. I've upgraded the drivers/software/firmware for the 3ware, and the problems continue. I'll open a ticket with 3ware on it, but wanted to pass the info along here to anyone else following it.

[Gorath Alpha]

FYI, if you aren't using RAID for security purposes, at which it excels, reconsider its use. The typical file sizes involved with games have not changed measureably since the last major benchtesting comparison of GAMES, real games, comparing RAID-0 (the one that helps with very large size files to improve transfer speeds) to single-drive performance.

RAID-0 didn't come out with any laurels in the tests, and any subsequest tests I've seem simply didn't have the same rigorous standards as those Anand's team applied.

G

Modifié par Gorath Alpha, 17 janvier 2010 - 12:08 .

[OH-UP-THIS!]

Maybe Gorath Alpha can back me up here but, as far as I have been able to discern, there was a problem posted in the nVidia forums that was determined to originate from 8600's/SLI'd, and creative soundcards.

And that's why I went with M-audio.

[Gorath Alpha]

Honestly, I pop in here often, read a few things, and pop back out again, often without seeing anything I think I have any contribution to offer about. I have missed any conflict shown to be common between any Creative product and any nVIDIA product.

However, it is a fact that nVIDIA was totally brand new to using the kind of general purpose processing units that the Geforce 8n00 generation shared with The Radeons from the 9n00s onward, and while they really did well at the top end with the 8800, it still meant that they stumbled often with drivers the first year, and are still having some driver troubles three years later.

(ATI also had some initial stumbles with the Radeon 9n00s and Xn00s.)

Plus, there were unnecessary heating issues from many Geforce 8n00 cards, especially mobile cards. I think that the 8600 GTs share some of that excessive heat symptom.

G

[Loki42]

Gorath Alpha: I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say. I built my system with RAID for fault tolerance, and I can't really just turn that off. I'd be looking at rebuilding my entire system. The RAID itself is not the problem anyhow, just the Windows service that the RAID controller manufacturer provides to monitor and manage the RAID controller seems to, inexplicably, screw up DA:O. I've submitted a bug report to 3Ware on this, and should probably find a way to submit one to Bioware too. This is definitely some kind of software conflict between DA:O and the 3DM2 manager for my RAID controller. I'm running RAID 5, BTW, which is NOT a performance RAID configuration.

ohupthis: I'd heard about all the problems with SLI'd 8600s, which prompted me to upgrade to a GTX 260 to try to solve this problem about a month ago. It made no change, and it turns out my problem had nothing to do with my video card, but system software for my RAID card. My SLI'd 8600s had no problems with any other games, so I would not recommend against that config if it's what you've got.

Modifié par Loki42, 17 janvier 2010 - 06:10 .