100% cpu usage?!

[GoodbyeNeko]

So I tried Dragon Age 2 for the first time , everything went great until I went to talk to Samson for the wayward son quest. Suddenly, the game started to lag terribly, I decided to do a ctrl alt del to check on task manager what was going on and I found out that the cpu was at 100% usage with DA2 using more than 85% of it!! 

How is possible? My computer is not a warmachine but it's decent enough to run more recent games with good video settings, what gives? Is there a fix for that? Thanks! 

[Elena_Chase]

@GoodbyeNeko Seems to be a very weird problem you got there.

Do you have any mods installed ? Maybe one of them is the culprit here and it kinda "forces" your cpu to work too much.

Are you running the game with HD texture ? They are known to cause trouble (though the ones I got were purely on the textures so don't know if it really is the reason your game might lag).

Do you encounter the problem on other games ? You might want to try and play games with the same specs requirement or with slightly more needed to see if it is problem from your computer.

Can you give your computer specs ? You said it is not a war machine and the game is fairly old but it might tell us more about what is behind this high cpu usage.

Did you try anything at all to fix the problem ? Like uninstall/reinstall or a repair or anything at all ? (I'd like to not tell you to do something you tried and that did not work).

I read something some time ago about fullscreen having a similar effect so maybe try to play in windowed mode and see if you cpu usage drops or not.

[vometia]

Probably rather too late to be of much use, but I'm seeing the same thing; and Oranges did the same too, as do many games, especially when "paused".  In my case I've employed the same work-around as with Oranges which is to launch it from a batch file using "start /affinity" to restrict the number of cores it can (ab)use.  With Oranges that largely fixed the problem: still got 100% CPU but not across my entire processor.  In DA2, there's serious stuttering problems if I use DX11 though.  Don't know if that's related or not but the "stuttering with DX11" is its own problem, both with DA2 and elsewhere.