Lags and Slowdowns

[xinthefreefallx]

So, I've been playing through all of Dragon Age again and have finally made my way back to Inquisition. One of the things I've been noticing are some extreme lagging with FPS dropping to as low as 10-15 FPS. Combat drops to 15 FPS frequently with actual animations slowing down as well. Now, I don't want to say I have the extremely beefiest of computers, but I think my computer is definitely powerful enough to handle it. Especially since I don't remember these lags happening when I first played this game when it first came out. 

Here are my computer specs:
8 gb of RAM

i5 3570k I think overclocked to 4.0 or 4.1 ghz
nVidia GeForce GTX 770

Updated to the last version for nVidia.

Everywhere I've looked says I should have decent FPS consistently with a lot of setting capable of playing at Ultra. 
I've turned off Post-Processing effects and Anti-Aliasing. Tesselation is set to High. A lot of important things like mesh quality and texture quality is set to Ultra as well. Like I said before, I don't remember these causing issues before and a had a lot more things at ultra setting previously. I'm having difficulty pinpointing what is the issue that could be causing this. If anyone also has similar specs of mine maybe could share what kind of FPS they're getting liek maybe this is all in my head or something. 

[xinthefreefallx · Accepted solution]

The previous steps actually made it run worse at like 2 fps. But, after uninstalling it and doing the clean boot it returned to the previous speed again, which was the problem. I lowered the setting to the lowest possible and I'm getting 55-60 fps. Which, I don't know why it would be dropping much at all at such a low setting. Turned the settings to Automatic and still turned off Post Processing and Anti-aliasing and that runs at 25-30 fps.  But, no matter what I still suffer from the 15 fps slowdowns frequently. As soon as the game hits under 20 fps it actually slow the game down and things begin to move in slow motion. I'm not entirely sure why this happens, but I'm pretty sure I've tried everything so far.

UPDATE: 
Looks like my problems been solved. I run my game on a 4K TV and my desktop is rendered at 4K for the clarity of text. But, looks like no matter what resolution you set the game at, it defaults to whatever the desktop is set to. So, I went into my resolution for the game and changed it back to 1920x1080 and it flipped right back to 4K after exiting the menu. After setting my desktop to 1080p, the game is defaulting to 1080p as well and everything is running smoothly. Strangely enough, NVidia Experience sees the game resolution as 1080 if you told the game to render at that, even though the game would default back to 4K. That's why I overlooked it. A minor, but frustrating bug, but it's all good now, I'll just render the desktop at 1080p whenever I want to play.

Thanks for all the help!

[Fred_vdp]

Those specs should indeed run the game pretty well.

Could you post a dxdiag report as instructed in part 2 of this sticky thread?

[xinthefreefallx]

Of course. Here it is:
http://hastebin.com/xazolekowu.tex

[Fred_vdp]

Fistly, make sure you're not running any overlay software. For instance: Fraps, or even the Origin in-game overlay (which you can disable in the Origin preferences).

Dxdiag looks fine. If disabling the Origin overlay doesn't work, maybe you should do a clean reinstall of your graphics drivers by first removing the drivers with DDU. You could also repair the game by right clicking it in Origin and selecting the 'repair game' option.

I have an AMD Radeon R9 390 and an Intel core i5 4690K and get 60fps most of the times at reasonably high settings. I don't have everything set to ultra however. Shadows, terrain and vegetation are set to high and I play at 1920x1080. Everything else is ultra with textures set to fade-touched. I think your PC should run the game well on high settings, but I wouldn't set too many options to 'ultra'. Still, your current framerate is indeed too low.

Do you have any other games that run on the Frostbite 3 engine? If so, how do they run?

[xinthefreefallx]

I'll try and just adjust the setting after a clean install of the graphics driver. This is the only Frostbite engine game I have so I have nothing more to base it off of. I'll let you know if that work. Thanks!

[EA_David]

@xinthefreefallx Hey, how did you get on? 

I wonder, if the steps above don't help, does restarting with a Clean Boot have any effect: https://help.ea.com/en/article/how-to-clean-boot-your-pc/

If you turn everything down to the lowest settings does this have a dramatic effect on performance, or is the change slight?

[xinthefreefallx · Accepted solution]

The previous steps actually made it run worse at like 2 fps. But, after uninstalling it and doing the clean boot it returned to the previous speed again, which was the problem. I lowered the setting to the lowest possible and I'm getting 55-60 fps. Which, I don't know why it would be dropping much at all at such a low setting. Turned the settings to Automatic and still turned off Post Processing and Anti-aliasing and that runs at 25-30 fps.  But, no matter what I still suffer from the 15 fps slowdowns frequently. As soon as the game hits under 20 fps it actually slow the game down and things begin to move in slow motion. I'm not entirely sure why this happens, but I'm pretty sure I've tried everything so far.

UPDATE: 
Looks like my problems been solved. I run my game on a 4K TV and my desktop is rendered at 4K for the clarity of text. But, looks like no matter what resolution you set the game at, it defaults to whatever the desktop is set to. So, I went into my resolution for the game and changed it back to 1920x1080 and it flipped right back to 4K after exiting the menu. After setting my desktop to 1080p, the game is defaulting to 1080p as well and everything is running smoothly. Strangely enough, NVidia Experience sees the game resolution as 1080 if you told the game to render at that, even though the game would default back to 4K. That's why I overlooked it. A minor, but frustrating bug, but it's all good now, I'll just render the desktop at 1080p whenever I want to play.

Thanks for all the help!

[Fred_vdp]

I saw the following in the dxdiag, which is why I didn't comment on resolution:

Native Mode: 1920 x 1080(p) (60.000Hz)

I completely skipped over

Current Mode: 3840 x 2160 (32 bit) (60Hz)

Whoops! The problem almost bit me in the face.

Glad you managed to fix the problem!

[EA_David]

Splendid, that's great to know going forward. As more folks move to 4k it seems likely that we'll encounter more issues like this, so it's good to see a case like this get cleared up with some solid troubleshooting.