For the information of those who might be interested.
My system is as followed: Core i7 920 (default 2.66 GHz) overclocked at 3.20 GHz water-cooled by a Corsair H50, 6GB RAM @ 1600 MHz, 2x ATI 5870 in Crossfire. As I'm not running the CPU at spec clocks and default cooling, I know that it may be not 100% revelant with the discussion in this thread. But anyway, it may proved usefull to some people.
1. After about 50 hours of play, I noticed my game was progressively slower in general. FPS dropped compared to when I started my campaign, loading times were longer and longer as was saving time. I looked at my saved game folder and I saw that it was now 1GB big. I erased all but my 5 last saved games and the game was back smooth like at the beginning, specially the loading times and saving times. The FPS went back almost to normal (capped at 60 FPS since I let VSync on). There's some area as in Denerim were the FPS drop, but it drop no lower than 40 while when I had a 1GB saved game folder, in those same areas, the FPS could drop below 30 FPS. Other point, some says that Dragon Age does not support Crossfire. I experienced the opposite. My game is much more fluid with crossfire enabled (I'm using catalyst 9.12 drivers).
2. I monitored heat and CPU usage over a 5 hours gaming session. In fact, I monitored 3 sessions, one of 2 hours, one of 3 hours and one of 5 hours. In every session, the max temp of the CPU cores was 66°C, and average about 60-62°C. I know that with the stock cooler, those temps would be higher, but keep in mind that my CPU is overclocked. Other thing, the CPU usage NEVER went over 50%... In that thread I read that dual core CPU were capped at 100% in the start menu. My quad core is between 25 and 30% in that menu.
Bottom line, Dragon Age is not as hard on my system as it can be on other system which got issues with overheating and excessive CPU usage. I don't know if it's the quad core that make all the difference...
Anyway, I just wanted to add some data to your discussion, in case that proves useful.
Cheers!
Saved Game Bloat?
Débuté par
4Aces
, déc. 24 2009 04:14
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#27
Posté 20 janvier 2010 - 04:08
BrunoB1971
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- Members
- 442 messages
The real question we should be asking ourselves is really why the problem is happening.
Bioware said that they tested the game and it was fine for them. So if you go with that assumption that means that the hardware to run the game should be fine and the game software should be fine too.
Now here comes the big one: Are the players doing something while playing the game that Bioware did not forecast.
Example: one user mentionned that he had tons of saves and that his game was slow, once he deleted some of those saves the game gained performance.
I wonder if bioware program/testers ever thought that too many saves in the save folder would bog down the game?
A lot of game do not have multiple saves, the save system overwrites the previous save which if corrupted would mean you have to start all over.
But dragon age seems to pile up it’s saves, Like command and conquer tiberium wars everytime you were saving it was creating a new file if you had named it differently so you ended up with tons of save and if I remember correctly it was affecting the performance of the game.
We have to ask the players this:
“ how many saves do you have in your save folder?”
“if you have many, can you move most of them to another area on your hard disk and keep just one save, restart the game and see if there was a change”
If that resolves the problem then it would mean that the game keeps a cache of all those saves and are on standby somehow and it is affecting the game.
I think the problem is a combination of things, not just one part software nor hardware.
The game may be bugged because of the way the player uses the game.
This may or may not be the problem at all but it is worth a shot.
Bioware said that they tested the game and it was fine for them. So if you go with that assumption that means that the hardware to run the game should be fine and the game software should be fine too.
Now here comes the big one: Are the players doing something while playing the game that Bioware did not forecast.
Example: one user mentionned that he had tons of saves and that his game was slow, once he deleted some of those saves the game gained performance.
I wonder if bioware program/testers ever thought that too many saves in the save folder would bog down the game?
A lot of game do not have multiple saves, the save system overwrites the previous save which if corrupted would mean you have to start all over.
But dragon age seems to pile up it’s saves, Like command and conquer tiberium wars everytime you were saving it was creating a new file if you had named it differently so you ended up with tons of save and if I remember correctly it was affecting the performance of the game.
We have to ask the players this:
“ how many saves do you have in your save folder?”
“if you have many, can you move most of them to another area on your hard disk and keep just one save, restart the game and see if there was a change”
If that resolves the problem then it would mean that the game keeps a cache of all those saves and are on standby somehow and it is affecting the game.
I think the problem is a combination of things, not just one part software nor hardware.
The game may be bugged because of the way the player uses the game.
This may or may not be the problem at all but it is worth a shot.
#28
Posté 20 janvier 2010 - 04:12
Valaskjalf
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- 283 messages
I have close to 5 GB of saves now and it don't see a performance impact
#29
Posté 20 janvier 2010 - 04:24
BrunoB1971
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- 442 messages
how much ram do you have in your rig?
#30
Posté 05 mars 2010 - 07:15
Ronnan
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- 67 messages
I came across this thread from the Nexus, where I was reading about some high resolution texture packs and possible heat problems.....
Under Dragon Age load last night my AMD Phenom X4 965 was at ~45-50C....I'm using a pretty darn good Zalman cooler though. My Radeon 5870 was also fairly cold as well, but that also has a fairly diesel cooler on it as well.
I will say that after 5 days of playing Dragon Age for more than an hour each, it needed to be rebooted. There is certainly something that slows the game down quite a bit.
Under Dragon Age load last night my AMD Phenom X4 965 was at ~45-50C....I'm using a pretty darn good Zalman cooler though. My Radeon 5870 was also fairly cold as well, but that also has a fairly diesel cooler on it as well.
I will say that after 5 days of playing Dragon Age for more than an hour each, it needed to be rebooted. There is certainly something that slows the game down quite a bit.
