I may as well throw a monkey wrench into this argument. I'm running mine on a single core CPU and am seeing the slowdown problem so I doubt it's strictly a multi-core hardware issue. I realize I'm underspec for the game, but it runs surprisingly well anyway. My frame rates are easily above 20, until the performance degradation problem starts to manifest. The area load time is just one of the issues I am noticing when it occurs and it is the most severe of the symptoms by far. My frame rate drops significantly (maybe gets cut in half down to about 10) when it happens as well, but the severity of it varies wildly and is definitely dependent on the area I'm in, and my input devices become a little sluggish too (response time drops slightly yet noticably).
Intel Celeron 2.93 GHz single core
3 MB RAM
Intel Mobo
nVidia 7800 GSOC 256 MB
Win XP Pro SP3
What I've seen about it that surprised me was that while in combat everything runs smoothly. With my rig I expected all those opponent AIs and party tactics and VFXs to slow things to a crawl -- but not the case. In fact performance drops hardly at all during combat I have much more problems outside of combat just moving around and running convos. Post-combat is where I see the lag starting most often.
The slowdown can happen gradually over a long period of time (like maybe 1-2 hours) of light action play, with load time and frame rates eventually becoming unplayable until I restart. Or (most often) right after a particularly populated combat event with maybe 10-20 opponents it BAM starts lagging severely directly after the combat mode ends and my party stows their weapons, but only after playing for at least 15 minutes or so. If I save just before a big combat event, when I reload it and fight, no problem...if I've been playing awhile and run thru the big battle, as soon as its over the performance degrades sharply and stays that way until I reset. Although it doesn't happen every time a big battle ends, when it does happen, it usually starts right after combat and especially big combats. Those travelling encounters you get with about a dozen darkspawn are a major culprit for triggering it. It can take 2 hours to start happening or it can take 20 minutes, I've not seen much correlation between the time I've been playing and when it happens really...never as quick as like 5 minutes, but for me certainly it's started happened in less than 30 minutes before and other times as long as maybe 3 hours or more.
Unexpected part to me is that the combat itself with all that action runs fine even when the degradation is happening before combat starts, the slowdown doesn't show until everything has quieted down...performance actually gets better when the combat starts and returns to the lag when it ends. Convos are hit by the slowdown pretty severely, not during all the fancy animations and lip synching and VOs, no not there...rather, waiting for the list of responses to appear once the dialog lines have been delivered, and waiting for the convo to shut down at the end is what takes forever.
Another thing I noticed is that I must completely shut down the game all the way back to Windows to fix it. If I just quit and reload, it will still be lagging. This is more indicative of a memory leak than a hardware issue, but I didn't investigate enough to see if memory was actually leaking -- it sure behaves like a memory leak IMO.
Of course it could very well be different for me considering my rig is below recommended specs. I will point out again however that when the lag isn't happening my machine runs the game at a perfectly acceptable rate even in every single place where I experienced heavily lagging. There is also something about the Denerim market area right around the market tent in the center of it that makes my frame rate drop by about 30-40% every time I go there no matter when I do, but it is only around that one place -- once I run by it things pick up again.
Modifié par Axe_Murderer, 15 décembre 2009 - 02:34 .
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