Dragon Age: Origins Performance (Bootcamp)

[Arondel]

Hello, guys.
I was wondering if any of you had the chance of benchmarking Dragon Age: Origins on Windows through Bootcamp. I'm particularly interested in experiences with the 320M (hoping it can play on high at native resolution of 1280x800 with framebuffer effects on and no AA).
If anyone has something about it, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks a lot in advance!

EDIT: I found this video of a MacBook Pro 15" (2.66 GHz i7, NVIDIA GT 330M) playing the game. Hope it helps someone . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRz86ggoxhM

 

[0186279]

Hello, guys.
I was wondering if any of you had the chance of benchmarking Dragon Age: Origins on Windows through Bootcamp. I'm particularly interested in experiences with the 320M (hoping it can play on high at native resolution of 1280x800 with framebuffer effects on and no AA).
If anyone has something about it, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks a lot in advance!

EDIT: I found this video of a MacBook Pro 15" (2.66 GHz i7, NVIDIA GT 330M) playing the game. Hope it helps someone . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRz86ggoxhM

Hey Arondel, I responded to your post in the benchmark thread in the MBP section but I thought I'd drop in here as well.

Assuming how well I was able to play on my 330m I can only guess you will be able to play on medium settings no problem with your 320, who knows maybe even high? I am working on getting some more videos up of games on my machine but I will try doing a video of Dragon Age on my girlfriends 13" next week, shes got the 320m.

 

[JackAxe]

Regardless of performance, pick up.

A 320m has 32 stream cores, so it should do well enough at your notebook's native rez, the only concern is the integrated memory. The 330m has 48 for reference.

The game can be live or stop action, so if it gets to slow, just hit space to pause the battle, which you'll want to do anyhow once you get familiar with the game and things get more difficult. Pausing to choose tactics is a must on the higher difficult settings.

Anyways, I beat this game earlier this year on nightmare-difficulty and really enjoyed it -- it just has a bit of a get-into-curve, but easily one of my favorite RPGs in many years.

 

[aloysiuscarl]

This is Dragon Age: Origins, BioWare's latest RPG epic. It is a game that modern day BioWare fans, schooled on the Canadian studio's skill in making console RPGs accessible without sacrifice, may have imagined as Mass Effect in Oblivion's clothes.

 

[phobic99]

This is Dragon Age: Origins, BioWare's latest RPG epic. It is a game that modern day BioWare fans, schooled on the Canadian studio's skill in making console RPGs accessible without sacrifice, may have imagined as Mass Effect in Oblivion's clothes.

And the "Most Confusing Post of the Day" award goes to...

 

[Arondel]

Hey Arondel, I responded to your post in the benchmark thread in the MBP section but I thought I'd drop in here as well.

Assuming how well I was able to play on my 330m I can only guess you will be able to play on medium settings no problem with your 320, who knows maybe even high? I am working on getting some more videos up of games on my machine but I will try doing a video of Dragon Age on my girlfriends 13" next week, shes got the 320m.

Hi there.
I'd really appreciate that a lot. Thanks!
As I told you on the other thread, you're off to a very good start and hope you have the best of luck in the future! I'll keep supporting your effort .

Regardless of performance, pick up.

A 320m has 32 stream cores, so it should do well enough at your notebook's native rez, the only concern is the integrated memory. The 330m has 48 for reference.

The game can be live or stop action, so if it gets to slow, just hit space to pause the battle, which you'll want to do anyhow once you get familiar with the game and things get more difficult. Pausing to choose tactics is a must on the higher difficult settings.

Anyways, I beat this game earlier this year on nightmare-difficulty and really enjoyed it -- it just has a bit of a get-into-curve, but easily one of my favorite RPGs in many years.

Thanks for the info there, JackAxe!
I've played a bit of it on a friend's PC and love it. I've played the Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights series, too.
About the 320M IGP, I thought it had 48 processing/shader cores (without any dedicated VRAM). I've never seen a GPU-Z screenshot or similar of it though, so I could be wrong.

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/performance.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-320M.28701.0.html

And the "Most Confusing Post of the Day" award goes to...

xD.


I believe Dragon Age: Origins gets a nice little boost when running on three cores over two cores (it seems to be optimized for that number of cores). Since the i5 and i7 CPUs are quad threaded (among other advantages), I wanted to see what the difference was like.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...Tuning-Top-article-of-November-2009/Practice/
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...rks-75-percent-boost-for-quad-cores/Practice/

Note: Take into account these tests were done using desktop machines with desktop hardware in them.

Thanks a lot for your input!

 

[JackAxe]

Now I'm confused.

This link says it only has 24;
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-320M.25099.0.html

But as it's a custom build for Apple, I'll go by their specs and 48 cores is good. My previous GPU a 9600 GT had 64 stream cores and it had no problems running games like SFIV in the high 40s on max detail.

Anyways, DA is good at using most threads. It pegs 3 of my 8 threads at about 100% and uses about 30 - 50% of the rest.

OK, I just noticed that I can't launch DA with the original disc, only the Awakening expansion. Bleh.

+++

Oh, speaking of other RPGs, if you haven't already picked up The Witcher Enhanced edition. it's only $30 and absolutely great! Some ways better than Dragon Age IMO, but if I had to choose, I'd pick DA, since it offers a few variations.


++++++++++++++++++++++++

Must rant!!!

I decided to install Dragon Age on my Unibody 17", which has the 9600m to see how it plays, since this GPU is about the same range at the 320m from what I've read. Anyways, I have Windows 7 64 under Bootcamp.

I spent about 40 minutes creating my character to only have the computer RESTART on me. At first I thought it had crashed, but it hadn't. The system had finished downloading updates in the background, so restarted itself without bothering to check WTF I was doing as a user, let alone ask for my permission. ABSOLUTELY DUMB!!!! I haven't used Win 7 much, but so far it's only got in my way over and over, something XP 64 does not do!

Anyways, sorry, had to RANT!

Bleh!!!


Well, I'll know later how it runs, must sleep. I was running it at 1280 x 800, which at least in the character creation looked fine. I had most settings on high, except alias-off and vsync off. I know that coming from a Core 2 Quad 9450 to an i7 920, that the extra threads on the CPU really didn't make much of difference with any of my games, only a frame or two.

 

[Huntn]

Anyways, sorry, had to RANT!
Bleh!!!

Hey, it's Windows, ranting is part of the package...

 

[Arondel]

Now I'm confused.

This link says it only has 24;
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-320M.25099.0.html

But as it's a custom build for Apple, I'll go by their specs and 48 cores is good. My previous GPU a 9600 GT had 64 stream cores and it had no problems running games like SFIV in the high 40s on max detail.

Anyways, DA is good at using most threads. It pegs 3 of my 8 threads at about 100% and uses about 30 - 50% of the rest.

OK, I just noticed that I can't launch DA with the original disc, only the Awakening expansion. Bleh.

I believe the NVIDIA 320M (IGP) is a different GPU from the NVIDIA GT 320M (dedicated/discrete).

Beware: The GT 320M should not be confused with the newer GeForce 320M in the Apple MacBook 13" 04/2010 laptops, which is a chipset graphics card.

NVIDIA 320M (IGP Apple is using): http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-320M.28701.0.html
NVIDIA GT 320M (dedicated/discrete): http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-320M.25099.0.html

+++

Oh, speaking of other RPGs, if you haven't already picked up The Witcher Enhanced edition. it's only $30 and absolutely great! Some ways better than Dragon Age IMO, but if I had to choose, I'd pick DA, since it offers a few variations.


++++++++++++++++++++++++

Thanks for the recommendation. I'd seen some of the original on previews and reviews, but never got to playing it. I will now! (Especially now that the second installment has been announced)

Must rant!!!

(...)

Anyways, sorry, had to RANT!

Bleh!!!


Well, I'll know later how it runs, must sleep. I was running it at 1280 x 800, which at least in the character creation looked fine. I had most settings on high, except alias-off and vsync off. I know that coming from a Core 2 Quad 9450 to an i7 920, that the extra threads on the CPU really didn't make much of difference with any of my games, only a frame or two.

It's alright now. We're here for you. xD

It is enraging when you customise your character for forty minutes to have the PC restart on you...

Thanks for your help!

 

[JackAxe]

@ Huntn,

True. But I had false hope that were past that, because XP64 has been such a good OS for me.

@ Arondel,

OK, that cleared things up.

I was also up super late, so my rage was amplified, just not in this post fortunately. I was silently screaming at my computer!

I'll post later once I get my saves moved over and caught up on some work. Most areas of DA run quite wel, but areas like Denerim are quite demanding, which is an area that can't be tested until a bit into the game, so I'll try it their with FRAPS enabled, so at least you'll have some approximation about how it will run.

Anyways, I'm going to start a new game since I'm going on vacation. This thread was enough to peak my interest again, because I really had no plans of installing any games on my MacBook Pro until now.

Buy the game already! And since you've played prior Bioware games, start off on Nightmare. :O

 

[Arondel]

Oh, I'll definitely get the game. I just need to get the system to play it on first xD. That's why I'm interested in seeing how well it fares on the MBP 13" (with the NVIDIA 320M IGP). The 15" ones are great, but getting the dough isn't as easy (logically).

Hope you guys are well! Cheers!