High End Rig, Low-Mid End performance

[pewerjenius]

Hi.

I got Dragon Age: Inquisition on Tuesday. My system seems to blow the recommended reqs out of the water (for the most part), yet for some reason, the game seems to be running kind of ... poorly. Not awful or unplayable by any means, but I'm averaging 30ish FPS and having a very choppy experience. If I pan the camera around, I get a quite a bit of stuttering. No major tearing to report.
To try and improve the situation, I've done a fair bit of messing around with Catalyst control center. Obviously, the first thing I did was drastically lower in-game graphics settings. No noticeable improvement between Ultra, high, mid, and low. I updated to the most recent version of my AMD drivers which cause a catastrophic effect. After updating drivers, my game (and actually any fullscreen 3d application) would either bluescreen or crash my computer entirely. Was unable to uninstall AMD drivers afterwards as it would blue screen everytime. Ended up with a clean install of windows. After the clean install, the problem persisted (and actually expanded to FIREFOX specifically) so I decided to roll back to the previous version. Games seem to be working fine now without incidents of crashing, but the initial problem still persists. What could be wrong? I read somewhere that Disabling CPU Parking was a thing I could try. I don't know anything about it but there is some utility floating around that let's you do that. I can't really think of a bottleneck here ... Ideas?

CPU: AMD FX 9370 4.4 GHz 8-cores

GPU: ATI Radeon HD 7950 IceQ 3GB Edition (x2 crossfired)

Memory: 16GB DDR3

Storage: Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250GB and a Corsair 2Tb

Motherboard:  ASRock 990FX Extereme9

PSU: Corsair CX750M 750W

[Lollermancer]

Im having the same experiance.

1440p Resolution
Cpu FX 8350
GPU 295x2
8g Ram


Having huge fps swings on medium from 60 to 15, I average 25fps on Ultra. Even with my resolution i should crush this game. But i get unstable framerate even on LOW.  

[pewerjenius]

Do you know of anywhere else we can get help for something like this?

[Lollermancer]

Im not sure, no official response. They reconized nvidia issues, alot of people have strong amd rigs, and are struggling on low settings.

[pewerjenius]

Okay, so I got a bit more info. Havent tried this yet, but, it was recommended to me to either disable CrossfireX or to remove one card and try it. I will try to report back after I have had the chance to get home and do this.

[DTLaw]

Could be amd drivers.

Im getting minimum 60 fps at 1440 with everything maxed except 2xmsaa. With my 980s.

[Lollermancer]

Am I wrong to assume that I should be getting a stable 60fps everywhere with my rig?

[Tiocfaidh]

So I have a crossfire setup with two R9 270 cards and I have no FPS problems. However, I _did_ have both FPS and loading problems when I had any type of game overlay running. I have AMD Gaming Evolved and turning off that application made the game work a lot better. The same goes for the Origin overlay. Just disable all of that.

I also experienced a lot of problems when using the Mantle API and CrossfireX, so I'd recommend using Direct3D for the time being. I'm sure there'll be drivers with better CrossfireX performance in this game, but for now we kinda just have to suck it up. If none of the above works, then, I'd recommend disabling CrossfireX.

[Lollermancer]

I have done origin overlay, and gaming evoled. My FPS actually goes up in mantle, its unplayable with Dx11. Nothing seems to change when i disable Crossfire X.

[Tiocfaidh]

I don't know what to say. There's no way you should be getting unstable framerates on low, even with just the one card. 

I'm using the beta drivers from AMD which improve performance with the game, have you tried those?