First Post on an annoying problem I have...

[SpellAndShield]

Well, I can't tell you what graphics card I have but I have an oldish (1+ year old) games laptop. I don't know what causes it but I get some serious lag sometimes, especially when multiple or lots of enemies appear. At first I thought I should turn down graphics settings to their lowest level but it didn't help. It runs equally shittily on high or low graphics and texture. So there is this lag. There is another weird thing that someone else has also complained about and that is spells taking 15 seconds or more to go off; for example Morrigan casts cones of cold and it take over 10 seconds to go off; enemies move out of the way frequently when this happens...healing spells take forever to go off and my characters die; plus damage isn't registered until way later. Do you have any idea what could be causing this? Because it happens on all graphics levels...maybe my computer just wasn't meant to handle the game? What do you think?

 

Thanks to all!

[Balagor]

I think your problem is the laptop. I don´t know how powerfull your particular lap is, but in general they are way too weak for gaming, and DAO is a power consumer.

To get rid of lags and have the game run smoothly, you´ll need a dualcore CPU at 3.0 ghz, 4 GB of RAM, and at least 500 mb grafic card with at least 128 stream processors. If you don´t meet with theese specs, it lags.

By other words you need another PC. Sorrry. :blush:

[DarkeWolf]

1) make sure to turn off power managment when gaming, and have it plugged into the wall socket. Power management will DECREASE the overall system perfomance in an effort to decrease power consumption to extend a laptop's battery life. Yes... these settings CAN make your CPU cycle slower, your ram run slower, your monitor to use less color settings, and lower brightness/contrast settings, stuff like this, trying to get more juice from your batt.

2) It may not be a graphics problem, but rather the memory leak built into the game. This game consumes a lot of system resources, especially when loading large areas and savegames. And then doesnt release those resources as it's supposed to.

You can try to assist with this, by shutting down any non-essential running processes. Like scanner software, printer software, any music/video programs that autorun in the background and arent being used, Virus scanner (if you're not online at the time), firewall software (again, if you're not online at the time, and dont have wifi or bluetooth active) etc.

ctrl + alt + del (delete) keys all three at once, will get you into the program manager, which will let you select which programs you want to shut down.

3) Cut down as much of the graphics as you can. Such as floating damage numbers, persistant gore, gore levels, OMG...whats it called??? Ummm... when people talk, their words are displayed in text. Stuff like all of that, that takes up more CPU cycles and ram usage.

4) Clean up your hard drive and registry. This will take some of the strain off your system at boot, which will give you more resources to use when Gaming. Also clean up your startup so that you dont have anything running in the background to take up resources.

type in msconfig and run. click the startup tab, then tick on selective startup. Go through then go thru the list to see if there's anything that you recognize in there, that you can do without it starting itself up with the computer's boot. Some of that stuff is essential tho, so if you tick off something and then end up having issues later, go back in and tick it so that it starts up by itself. I'd recommend making a list of what you change.

Also, some of this stuff will have names that you dont recognize. Look them up online. Google can be your buddy :wink:

 

 

Good luck! :smile:

[SpellAndShield]

1) make sure to turn off power managment when gaming, and have it plugged into the wall socket. Power management will DECREASE the overall system perfomance in an effort to decrease power consumption to extend a laptop's battery life. Yes... these settings CAN make your CPU cycle slower, your ram run slower, your monitor to use less color settings, and lower brightness/contrast settings, stuff like this, trying to get more juice from your batt.

2) It may not be a graphics problem, but rather the memory leak built into the game. This game consumes a lot of system resources, especially when loading large areas and savegames. And then doesnt release those resources as it's supposed to.

You can try to assist with this, by shutting down any non-essential running processes. Like scanner software, printer software, any music/video programs that autorun in the background and arent being used, Virus scanner (if you're not online at the time), firewall software (again, if you're not online at the time, and dont have wifi or bluetooth active) etc.

ctrl + alt + del (delete) keys all three at once, will get you into the program manager, which will let you select which programs you want to shut down.

3) Cut down as much of the graphics as you can. Such as floating damage numbers, persistant gore, gore levels, OMG...whats it called??? Ummm... when people talk, their words are displayed in text. Stuff like all of that, that takes up more CPU cycles and ram usage.

4) Clean up your hard drive and registry. This will take some of the strain off your system at boot, which will give you more resources to use when Gaming. Also clean up your startup so that you dont have anything running in the background to take up resources.

type in msconfig and run. click the startup tab, then tick on selective startup. Go through then go thru the list to see if there's anything that you recognize in there, that you can do without it starting itself up with the computer's boot. Some of that stuff is essential tho, so if you tick off something and then end up having issues later, go back in and tick it so that it starts up by itself. I'd recommend making a list of what you change.

Also, some of this stuff will have names that you dont recognize. Look them up online. Google can be your buddy :wink:

 

 

Good luck! :smile:

 

Thank you. I guess the truth is I need a proper PC with with the right capabilities...which I will have to wait for for a while...oh well...I'll try what you said first. Thanks

[DarkeWolf]

Well... for my completely honest opinion, you need a serious gaming machine to run this game without ANY troubles. Talkng 4-6 gigs of RAM, dou-core cpu's clocking around 2.7 or better, 1 gig+ vid cards with high speed vram, etc.

 

Oh! I forgot.... I havent tried looking into this yet, I keep forgetting about it. But you might check into some RAM management software. An app that will refresh your ram as it's not being used.

 

I most definitely wish you the best of luck. This is NOT a machine friendly game.

[Kamajii]

1 gig+ vid cards with high speed vram

 

1GB? I run with 512 and play the game with full settings cranked up and watch videos at the same time. >_> The rest I'll agree with you on.

[Balagor]

1 gig+ vid cards with high speed vram

 

1GB? I run with 512 and play the game with full settings cranked up and watch videos at the same time. >_> The rest I'll agree with you on.

 

I do not know what card you have, but I agree with you. An old Geforce GTS 8800 at only 324 mb, can also do the trick. The secret is the many streamprocessors (128) on said card. They are WAY more important than the RAM buffer.

Other than that I agree with you DarkeWolf. The CPU can not be fast enough. I run DAO satisfactory, in full settings, with a AMD Phenom II 945 x 4 3.6Ghz. Don´t think about the 4 cores, they are worth nothing. I chose it because it can be overclocked to 4.0 gigs with no problems.

[RustyBlade]

My game has recently developed the same damage lag issue. It didn't start happening until my addins folder crossed the 3 GB mark and at least in my case I know it is directly related to the fact that I have overloaded things. I'm curious as to how many mods the original poster has installed; just a thought.

[SpellAndShield]

My game has recently developed the same damage lag issue. It didn't start happening until my addins folder crossed the 3 GB mark and at least in my case I know it is directly related to the fact that I have overloaded things. I'm curious as to how many mods the original poster has installed; just a thought.

 

Too many; I think I have lost count...ugh.

 

Oh well...will remove some now...

[DarkeWolf]

try defragging the drive that your override folder is on. Usually, it's C:

defraggler (google it) is a really good, free app for that.

3 gigs is a pretty good sized chunk of space to have fragmentation on.

 

the majority of it, is because of how much memory is (crappily) used to open up a savegame. The further you get into the game, the bigger your savegame gets. the bigger the savegame file gets, the more memory it pigs down opening it.