13 réponses à ce sujet

[berelinde]

During conversation, the framerate starts out fine, but drops to one frame per five minutes (yes, really) after a few clicks. It stays at that rate until the conversation ends. A loadscreen followed, which took 5 minutes. Another conversation started, and that one hung for 10 minutes before I gave up and shut down the game. The dialogue in question was the end of the Harrowing (mage origin), where you talk to the rage demon (convo ran at normal speed), fight (fight ran at normal speed), talk to Mouse (conversation started out normal, framerate deteriorated rapidly), then load, coversation starts with Jowan (hung, had to exit). This game has been stable on my system since I originally installed it, and I added nothing new since the last time it operated normally.

My system:
OS: Vista
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20 GHz
Memory: 3.00 GB
System type: 32 bit
Video card: NVidia GeForce 8600M GT (256 MB)

What I tried: Rebooted, uninstalled DA, reinstalled DA, patch 1.02a, reinstalled DLC, cleared download cache, deleted all unnecessary saved games, turned all settings to lowest possible, reduced resolution to 800x600 (windowed mode, it's a 1440 x 900 monitor), unchecked all video options and sound options, rebooted again, making absolutely sure the startup routine had completed and that absolutely no non-system programs were running.

Problem persisted. If anything, it's worse. Loading other saves shows the same result.

[roybm]

hmm i been thinking for awhile on this.
Can you control, alt, delete out to get to task manager?

if so look on the process list and see if something is taking up a ton of memory when this is happening.

also does the game play fine with no patching?
really no performance patches have been released just game balancing stuff has.

Modifié par roybm, 21 décembre 2009 - 04:16 .

[berelinde]

Yes, I was able to CTRL-ALT-DEL out to fire up Task Manager. That's about the only way I could get the game to shut down.

Going on a hunch, I uninstalled the game again, reinstalled, and patched with 1.02a. This time, I waited until after I had completed the origin story before installing any of the DLC. This time, even after completing the origin story and moving on to Ostragar (with the DLC installed), I'm noticing a profound improvement. Sure, combat is still choppy at times, and if a dialogue follows combat in a place with a lot of ambient visual effects or leftover spell effects, the framerate drops somewhat, and the audio stutters sometimes, but overall performance has improved greatly.

At this point, I'm not sure whether the buggy behavior or the current improvement is the fluke.

Since the post above, I updated my video card driver (which involved a BIOS update... very scary), ran a registry cleaner, reduced the number of idle processes, altered the default behavior of my system updater not to check for updates unless instructed to do so, defragged the hard drive, and installed CleanMem. Maybe this is a case of many littles making a much. I guess time will tell.

Modifié par berelinde, 21 décembre 2009 - 04:48 .

[REH1967]

When I encounter a seemingly eternal loading screen or slowdowns, my task manager indicates taht CPU usage is maxed but system memory appears to be fine, usually only 1.5 out of 4 gigs at the most being used. the curious thing, is my slowdowns will usually go away once I move out of an area, but the load screens seem to get longer and longer.



Thus far, I haven't had a load screen not eventually load the next area, but prior to my tweaking, I could go make a couple of sandwiches and coffee during those times...at the end of the day, system usage by the game engine will need to be addressed by Bioware. The tweaking Ive done on my system has been sensible things I'd prolly have done anyways for gaming but I wont be doing anything weird to my machine.



-CleanMem (nifty utility I use all the time)

-turned off enhancements in my sound mixer configuration to reduce CPU load

-using native Microsoft Windows 7 drivers for my Realtek hardware to lower overhead and keep it simple



System Specs:

Win 7 x64

4 gigs

AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+

ATI Radeon HD 3870 512

[tallon1982]

When I had framerate issues on another game (LOTRO) the issue for me was the vid card and power supply. Once I replaced those I kissed the low framerates goodbye. Pricey fix but sometimes necessary.

[JironGhrad]

What settings are you running it at normally? With only 256mb of Video RAM you're probably filling it up pretty fast. Also, have you updated your audio drivers lately? How about the motherboard drivers? I picked up a new Radeon 4670 this past week and it runs DA:O fine maxed out but, when I loaded up Dawn of War 2 it went into "Video driver has stopped responding and been recovered" over and over... as much as 5 times in 10 minutes. After doing all sorts of video driver things, I happen to find a post buried several pages deep in a forum about how forcing the CPU to video device into being a video to video device fixed a particular problem I went hunting for new motherboard drivers.



My motherboard didn't have any new ones from the mfg, but there were additional intel drivers and installing those resolved the majority of my issues.

[quietguy83]

 Im having the exact same problem in the exact same place. Tho it pertains to more than just this area on another Character im playing at the same time same problem with dialogue just after ur first encounter with the crows. So i figured it was a diver problem or perhaps a mod i was using so i did a fresh install and a new character and no mods... and the problem is still there. Tho i did notice that its using alot less memory this time round. So memory leak is out of the question. Any ideas on what i should try next??

[berelinde]

I'm running at 100% CPU usage any time the game is running, so I never run it for very long at a time. It's a laptop, so the best I can do is put it on a cool mat and make sure that I'm never running the game for long stretches of time.



Actually, it's EA that's responsible for technical issues. Contacting their tech support proved futile. I waited over 30 minutes to chat online with one of their "tech support experts." He didn't want to know any particulars about the problem, didn't ask me word one about my system. I could have been trying to run it on an old 486, and he would never have known. After describing the symptoms, he said "Gameplay issue. Not our job. Post on the forum." I explained that a performance issue that rendered the game unplayable could only be a function of tech support. He said he needed to forward it to his supervisor and tha I could expect to hear from somebody shortly. I got an email from the support department that was nothing more than a transcript of the chat, with the helpful suggestion that if my problem wasn't solved, I should contact support again. Mabe I'll hear more later, but I'm not holding my breath.



No, REH1967, I don't think we can expect EA or BioWare to address system usage issues any time soon.



It's a shame, really. Roybm is probably on the right track. I suspect that a performance patch is really the only definitive solution.

[berelinde]

JironGhrad wrote...

What settings are you running it at normally? With only 256mb of Video RAM you're probably filling it up pretty fast.

 One click up from low on the sliders. Not at medium. 

 Also, have you updated your audio drivers lately? How about the motherboard drivers?

Two weeks ago, I had my computer in for a routine service which included cleaning and replacing the thermal paste. Because it's my brother-in-law's shop, he updated my drivers at that time, though he didn't update the video driver because he said it required a BIOS update, and I was afraid of doing it. The end result is that all of the drivers have been updated within the last two weeks.

 I picked up a new Radeon 4670 this past week and it runs DA:O fine maxed out but, when I loaded up Dawn of War 2 it went into "Video driver has stopped responding and been recovered" over and over... as much as 5 times in 10 minutes. After doing all sorts of video driver things, I happen to find a post buried several pages deep in a forum about how forcing the CPU to video device into being a video to video device fixed a particular problem I went hunting for new motherboard drivers.

My motherboard didn't have any new ones from the mfg, but there were additional intel drivers and installing those resolved the majority of my issues.

Hmmm. Something to think about if the problem returns, I guess. At present, I can live with a bit of choppiness. The odd thing is, I've never gotten a lot of crashes or "video driver has stopped responding" messages. Only once in a very rare while, maybe three times since 5 Nov, and not at all with the most recent issue. If it was overheating, you'd think I'd be getting them more often. I suspect the culprit is more likely the memory. I was kind of shocked when I ran Registry Mechanic's system optimizer and saw all the absolute cruft that was running. If I'm not connected to the internet, I don't need to have anti-viral software running, for example, and it certainly doesn't need to constantly monitor for updates.

@quietguy83: Have you tried disabling visual and audio effects? One of the things I tried was reducing the video settings to low and disabling visual effects and ambient animations. Fade haze does eat resources. Also, how heavily modified is your game? If you've got a lot of mods in your override or AddIns folder, they're hogging RAM, since they get loaded into RAM whether you're using the content at that moment or not. A lot of the gear mods are surprisingly big. 300MB doesn't seem like a lot, but it adds up.

Modifié par berelinde, 21 décembre 2009 - 05:56 .

[quietguy83]

ok ive reinstalled more times than i care to count clean my registry, cleaned my card just incase it was getting to hot, updated drivers, defraged, removed all my mods, and im starting to think it actually might be a problem with the audio drivers. So with that in ming im gonna change my drivers from the latest to what micrsoft keeps wanting to install... hoping that maybe that will do the trick. By the way if u dont already use Game booster berelinde u should try it free program that stops alot of needless services.

[Offkorn]

A simple 'fix' is to just exit to the main menu and reload. That resets the loading times.



It appears to be an issue with the caching system. Old area data is not de-caching on area transition as it should. The exit to the main menu forces the data to be purged.

[roybm]

Keep in mind, this game is VERY heavy on the CPU. Bioware may need to look into this, as I am almost afraid to run it with my system. All 4 cores max out at 100% for me.



As for the lag, you can try some of the following to maybe get better performance:

* Turn off Frame Buffer Effects

* Go into your nvidia display and force shadowing to be turned off (huge boost in performance)

* Lower your Anti-aliasing (to be honest I personally did not see any effects turning this off or on to max. Maybe lower systems will see improvements)

* Try lowering your resolution on the game to a reasonable level. Just because your monitor can run at a super high resolution, does not mean your graphics card can handle the game at that res.

* Change the refresh rate on your monitor. 60 hertz is standard but some default much higher on newer models.

* vsync can play a huge roll with performance. Try messing with it on and off after changing the hertz on the monitor. vsync will force the games fps to run at whatever you set your monitor to. IE - 60 hertz = 60fps, 75 hertz = 75 fps, but if your computers gpu cant keep up with it this may cause serious lag. On some systems like mine, turning vsync off causes the game to run at very high frame rates 90+ but there is nasty studdering and jumps in the video.

Turning it back on locks it and smooths the frames out. Experiment with different settings untill you get one that seems to work right for you.



This is all I can really think to offer. Sorry if you already knew a lot of this but maybe someone else may use this info to help their game run better.



On another note, some areas are very large and take a lot out of the computer to just keep them loaded. Doing the above may not help on lower end systems.



There is still an issue with certain cpu's (amd in particular) that just seems to not have any fix for until bioware releases a patch or the graphics drivers are updated. No one is really certain for a fact what is causing these issues but the majority of people complaining own AMD based systems, so one can only speculate that an AMD chip is the culprit.

Hopefully this will be addressed soon.



Hope this info helps someone out a bit.

[quietguy83]

Ok problem ended when i used mod manager to uninstall the DLC i had. Apparently there is a file that is easily corupted sill trying to figure out exactly which file it is. But from what i can tell it seems to happen often for a variety of reasons. that said the source is a corupted file. If u do a reinstall make sure u defrag and close everything possible. Thats the best advice i can give u and wait till after ostagar to install any DLC. This isnt a performance issue as i had the problem with only 50% load on my CPU and only half my memory being used.

[Gunny5821]

berelinde wrote...

During conversation, the framerate starts out fine, but drops to one frame per five minutes (yes, really) after a few clicks. It stays at that rate until the conversation ends. A loadscreen followed, which took 5 minutes. Another conversation started, and that one hung for 10 minutes before I gave up and shut down the game. The dialogue in question was the end of the Harrowing (mage origin), where you talk to the rage demon (convo ran at normal speed), fight (fight ran at normal speed), talk to Mouse (conversation started out normal, framerate deteriorated rapidly), then load, coversation starts with Jowan (hung, had to exit). This game has been stable on my system since I originally installed it, and I added nothing new since the last time it operated normally.

My system:
OS: Vista
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20 GHz
Memory: 3.00 GB
System type: 32 bit
Video card: NVidia GeForce 8600M GT (256 MB)

What I tried: Rebooted, uninstalled DA, reinstalled DA, patch 1.02a, reinstalled DLC, cleared download cache, deleted all unnecessary saved games, turned all settings to lowest possible, reduced resolution to 800x600 (windowed mode, it's a 1440 x 900 monitor), unchecked all video options and sound options, rebooted again, making absolutely sure the startup routine had completed and that absolutely no non-system programs were running.

Problem persisted. If anything, it's worse. Loading other saves shows the same result.

Quick questions:
1.  You are using Vista, but you don't say what Service Patch is in place.
2.  You mention the NVIDIA, but again, you don;t mention what version of the driver you are using.
3.  I take it that this is a Laptop, what make and model.

Gunny