To be fair, you could apply that sentence to just about any game released during the past decade...
To be fair, you could apply that sentence to just about any game released during the past decade...overall I think the game it looks great, compare it to Dragon Age II...
To be fair, you could apply that sentence to just about any game released during the past decade...
DAI on low looks way better than DA2 on very high.Well, I ran DA2 on a 2.2 ghz core 2 duo and 9800 GT, and am sure I used at least medium, and I think it was high, and dont recall any performance problems.
With DAI, I have a 3ghz i5 and a HD7770 and can only run medium, and it still is not particularly smooth.
It seems to me that some people are expecting every new game to blow their socks off on all big name releases. Unfortunately, that just doesn't happen very often. The last time something totally shocked me was playing Morrowind, because of how real the water looked compared to any game I had played before.
I also believe RPG's may have some technical requirements that hold back some IQ settings a little.
I will say that DA:I's faces are a huge step forward from what I've seen in any game before (I haven't bought another AAA game this year). It would have been nice if the hair had done the same.
GTX980 leads only because reference GTX970 is bad card with only 145w TDP and because that reference GTX980 operate in much much higher clocks.No surprises really as that's been the case for 2+ years now.
- 980's lead over 970 is very consistent in the latest games, suggesting 970 is clearly TMU and/or shader performance bottlenecked (both of those are cut by 20% from the 980).
So, back when I did my DAI benchmarks, I never investigated memory usage. Well, I just did a rough approximation of memory usage with MSI Afterburner. My system was what I have in my sig, and the settings were everything maxed out except MSAA was off (post process AA was on max), and I tested with textures set to "Ultra" and textures set to "Fade-touched" (the maximum). I tested by walking around the crossroads in the Hinterlands and walking around Haven.
With textures set to Ultra, I got between 1600-1800 MB used of VRAM. With textures set to Fade-Touched I got between 1700-1900 MB used of VRAM. VRAM never seemed to touch 2000, though, and the game itself seems to recognize 2027 MB of VRAM via an in-game console display.
So that's the data, and here's my interpretation: Maybe my thoughts that I was running into a VRAM bottleneck aren't so true? At least, the game is not constantly chomping at the bit for more than 2 GB of VRAM. The highest texture setting doesn't actually add detail to textures, from what I've read; it just expands addressable cache size to help reduce pop-in. I guess you could push VRAM usage over the 2 GB threshold by both using fade-touched textures and turning on MSAA, which I didn't try because my 270X doesn't have the horsepower for it anyways. But when you actually consider the assets of the game and what it takes to render then, my findings indicate that at 1080P, Dragon Age Inquisition does not require more than 2 GB to get the most image detail out if it.
... But when you actually consider the assets of the game and what it takes to render then, my findings indicate that at 1080P, Dragon Age Inquisition does not require more than 2 GB to get the most image detail out if it.
What were the rest of your settings? I personally found tessellation behaved as if it pushed my VRAM usage more than textures did. Or at least, it sent me over the top, particularly in places like Crossroads and Redcliff.
So, back when I did my DAI benchmarks, I never investigated memory usage. Well, I just did a rough approximation of memory usage with MSI Afterburner. My system was what I have in my sig, and the settings were everything maxed out except MSAA was off (post process AA was on max), and I tested with textures set to "Ultra" and textures set to "Fade-touched" (the maximum). I tested by walking around the crossroads in the Hinterlands and walking around Haven.
With textures set to Ultra, I got between 1600-1800 MB used of VRAM. With textures set to Fade-Touched I got between 1700-1900 MB used of VRAM. VRAM never seemed to touch 2000, though, and the game itself seems to recognize 2027 MB of VRAM via an in-game console display.
So that's the data, and here's my interpretation: Maybe my thoughts that I was running into a VRAM bottleneck aren't so true? At least, the game is not constantly chomping at the bit for more than 2 GB of VRAM. The highest texture setting doesn't actually add detail to textures, from what I've read; it just expands addressable cache size to help reduce pop-in. I guess you could push VRAM usage over the 2 GB threshold by both using fade-touched textures and turning on MSAA, which I didn't try because my 270X doesn't have the horsepower for it anyways. But when you actually consider the assets of the game and what it takes to render then, my findings indicate that at 1080P, Dragon Age Inquisition does not require more than 2 GB to get the most image detail out if it.
With the latest Inquisition patch and AMD drivers, I decided to do a little testing on my brother's PC (stock Q6600, Radeon HD 5770 1 GB @ 890/1300, 4 GB 667 MHz RAM, Windows 7). I had MSI Afterburner running in the background to monitor GPU and VRAM usage, which I hadn't done before with his system.
The game really does seem CPU limited, using all 4 cores. The monitor indicated they all stayed above at least 80% usage while running the game. Walking around the Hinterlands, the game fluctuated around 40 frames per second -- when there were no NPCs. In a high-NPC area like the Hinterlands Crossroads, the framerate plummeted below 20 FPS. Checking the monitor, GPU usage also went down to around 70% or 60% in the Crossroads, while it stayed above 90% outside the Crossroads. Low GPU usage is an indicator that the CPU isn't feeding the GPU enough frames to fully use it.
So, Inquisition should see benefit from Mantle in CPU performance with something like a Q6600. We haven't seen much GPU benefit from Mantle with Inquisition, but CPU is supposed to be the bigger benefit with Mantle. Of course, the 5770 doesn't support Mantle, but my brother might be getting a Radeon 260X in the near future (along with 4 sticks of 2 GB 800 MHz DDR2 RAM), so I might be able to test it. We'll see.