I love the game very much. I have played through the Mass Effect series and just got around to playing dragon age. After about 1 hr to 2 hrs of gameplay I get a random crash to desk top. I am currently in the deep roads where the problem has been more persistant during large fights. I have tried turning graphics down to no help. I've searched the forums and haven't found a simple fix just a lot of locked threads. It is bumming me out because of how much I love the game and it is starting to be so bad the game is getting un playable. I have racked up 55 hrs of gameplay. I just want to beat it and go to # 2 so I can be ready when 3 comes out in the future. I am not having any problems with overheating and the only other game I had this problem with was Skyrim until I downloaded the 4gb patch/mod. I have never modded any bioware game. This is the first bioware game I am having problems with. Drivers are all kept up to date. My current system specs are:
I7 950 quad core clocked to 3.7ghz
Asus Sabertooth X58
12 gb 1600 mghz Corsair Ram
480 GTX EVGA in SLI stock clock speeds (I've tried to turn off sli and problem still persists)
Corsair ATX 1200 PS
Corsair 120gb SSD
1 GB WD HDD 7200RPM
2 GB WD HDD 7200RPM
Dragon Age Origins Ultimate edition crashing constantly
Débuté par
Justin L
, août 23 2012 12:40
Retour en haut
#2
Posté 23 août 2012 - 02:56
RaenImrahl
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- Members
- 5 386 messages
Justin,
Sorry you're having problems. First off, thanks for the complete and concise report. Hopefully this will help a few of our regulars here to make some suggestions.
Unfortunately, DA:O, being a 3+ year old game, is not a perfect one, and continues to have some stability issues. Ironically (or at least counter-intuitively) this seems to happen on higher-end gaming machines... of which yours certainly is one. So I'll offer some general observations-- your mileage may vary, of course:
1) The engine for DA:O is fairly un-optimized. That's my opinion, at least, as an enlightened amateur... if you are overclocking your CPU, this may actually lend itself to some serious in-game instability. So my first suggestion would be trying to play at standard clock speeds for your I7 950... which I think (but I am not sure) is somewhere closer to 3.0 MHZ.
2) Your GTX 480 is a great card. It may actually come "factory overclocked". You may consider reducing the memory timing speed by about 20% to see if that helps. I haven't done this in a long time, so I am not sure if the Nvidia Control Panel will let you do this, or if you need to seek some other software solution for this.
3) In addition to lowering graphic settings, you may consider lowering the actual screen resolution to the next lowest setting (while still preserving your aspect ratio). In fact, you might find more stability at a lower aspect ratio but using the maximum effects (like AA, etc).
4) Turn off "persistent gore". This feature can cause some slowdowns, especially in heavy combat situations.
5) If you're playing for long periods of time (on the order of two or more hours without a break) consider saving, existing, and restarting your computer. This will clear our the memory and the windows page file. While it has never been proven (at least not to my satisfaction) that DA:O has a true memory leak... doing this can't hurt (your eyes may thank you in the long run, anyway!).
6) It is possible (though I think unlikely in your case) that there is a corruption in your display driver. Issues like that can persist even when drivers are updated. You may, as a last resort, consider doing a clean uninstall and reinstall your display drive in Windows Safe Mode. There's a link to a "how to" below in my sig. However, doing so will also clear out any custom settings you've made in the Nvidia Control Panel... so this option is a pain. I'd probably not do this until you've exhausted all other options.
None of these solutions are a magic bullet. You may find that some or all of them, in combination, help a little. For what it's worth, DA2 uses the same engine as DA:O, but it runs a lot smoother in some cases... so they obviously tweaked the code between the development of the two games.
One final note... I assume you're already running the 1.05 patch. If not, consider installing it... it does address some DX10 issues that caused slowdowns (though I believe these were primarily in load screens).
Hope that get's you started, at least. Let us know what progress you make.
RI
Sorry you're having problems. First off, thanks for the complete and concise report. Hopefully this will help a few of our regulars here to make some suggestions.
Unfortunately, DA:O, being a 3+ year old game, is not a perfect one, and continues to have some stability issues. Ironically (or at least counter-intuitively) this seems to happen on higher-end gaming machines... of which yours certainly is one. So I'll offer some general observations-- your mileage may vary, of course:
1) The engine for DA:O is fairly un-optimized. That's my opinion, at least, as an enlightened amateur... if you are overclocking your CPU, this may actually lend itself to some serious in-game instability. So my first suggestion would be trying to play at standard clock speeds for your I7 950... which I think (but I am not sure) is somewhere closer to 3.0 MHZ.
2) Your GTX 480 is a great card. It may actually come "factory overclocked". You may consider reducing the memory timing speed by about 20% to see if that helps. I haven't done this in a long time, so I am not sure if the Nvidia Control Panel will let you do this, or if you need to seek some other software solution for this.
3) In addition to lowering graphic settings, you may consider lowering the actual screen resolution to the next lowest setting (while still preserving your aspect ratio). In fact, you might find more stability at a lower aspect ratio but using the maximum effects (like AA, etc).
4) Turn off "persistent gore". This feature can cause some slowdowns, especially in heavy combat situations.
5) If you're playing for long periods of time (on the order of two or more hours without a break) consider saving, existing, and restarting your computer. This will clear our the memory and the windows page file. While it has never been proven (at least not to my satisfaction) that DA:O has a true memory leak... doing this can't hurt (your eyes may thank you in the long run, anyway!).
6) It is possible (though I think unlikely in your case) that there is a corruption in your display driver. Issues like that can persist even when drivers are updated. You may, as a last resort, consider doing a clean uninstall and reinstall your display drive in Windows Safe Mode. There's a link to a "how to" below in my sig. However, doing so will also clear out any custom settings you've made in the Nvidia Control Panel... so this option is a pain. I'd probably not do this until you've exhausted all other options.
None of these solutions are a magic bullet. You may find that some or all of them, in combination, help a little. For what it's worth, DA2 uses the same engine as DA:O, but it runs a lot smoother in some cases... so they obviously tweaked the code between the development of the two games.
One final note... I assume you're already running the 1.05 patch. If not, consider installing it... it does address some DX10 issues that caused slowdowns (though I believe these were primarily in load screens).
Hope that get's you started, at least. Let us know what progress you make.
RI
#3
Posté 23 août 2012 - 04:06
Justin L
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- Members
- 3 messages
Raen, thanks for the quick response. I tried to under clock/factory clock and it happened less frequent. I did try running off of 1 core and that seemed good enough to get past the deep roads without a single crash. At the same time I did disable the EVGA software for overclocking/underclocking so that could be the saving grace as well. I will play with it more but I think the solution is close at hand with one of those problems.. Taking breaks though? Is that humanly possible with a game like this? :-P. It took me a bit to navigate through the forums as I am not very coordinated with them as I haven't had problems before with bioware games but came across a thread about the single processor. I will also try the persistent gore. It's cool but not needed. Again, thanks for the quick response on a 3 year old game. Love Bioware! I just wish they could put out games quicker! :-). I will inform whether it's the EVGA software or the single core. I'm just as curious.
#4
Posté 24 août 2012 - 05:39
Justin L
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- Members
- 3 messages
It's definitely running 1 core that fixes the problem. Was able to turn all settings to max after that without issues.
