Improving Inquisition load times

Load times on just about any new intensive game and for all it is dated, DAI is still fairly stressful on slightly older hardware, is a combination of several different things.

CPU...having a good enough CPU to run everything in a reasonable time is a must....so a decent one is needed.

RAM....having the ability to store and play with large segments of the game at once instead of having to cache them back on a HD in virtual memory is a must.

Fast HD...whether it is a SSD or a quality HD having a good, unfragmented and not maxed out HD/SSD is needed.

GPU...many people don't realize how much their GPU/graphics card, does for the machine when it comes to processing, and why a good one with decent memory and clock is needed.

So you add all these things up and you get load times....if you are getting extreme long times, and you don't want to spend big bucks, then look at the amount of free space on your HD, defragment it, close background processes that take up cpu and memory, lower resolutions and see what it does for you.  Spending minor money, would be more ram, maybe a HD that is dedicated to just your games...maybe a standard HD 500GB but very fast drive...or a smaller SSD  250G(those are still pricey for memory size...)

After that, then you start talking big money in a complete rebuild with faster cpu, SSD, 16G ram(or more), and a smoking GPU.....but like I said, big bucks....

Thanks for the reply. So you're saying a better CPU and GPU would improve load times? That doesn't sound like conventional wisdom. Let me be more specific about the hardware I'm trying to run DA:I on. It's a laptop, at one time a high-end model, but still just a laptop.

Specs:

Dell Precision M6600

CPU: Intel i5-2520M @ 2.5 GHz (dual core, hyperthreaded)

GPU: AMD Radeon 8950M 2GB

HD: WD Scorpio Black 7200RPM 500GB

RAM: 16GB DDR3-1600

The CPU is probably the weakest link in the chain, and could be upgraded to slower quad i7 for $50 - $70. The RAM is maxed out. The hard drive is about as good as it's going to get on a laptop, w/o going SSD. The GPU can be upgraded, but options are very limited and quite expensive for relatively little improvement.

I was hoping there were some config file settings I could change to improve load times, but that's not what I'm hearing. Do you really think investing in CPU with more cores would cut down on load times?

You are absolutely correct. I am using Mantle and it was slowing down load times by a tremendous amount. It's sad I have to give up Mantle, though. My average FPS falls by about 6 frames w/o Mantle, dropping from 41 fps to 35 fps. Minimums are even worse, going from 31 fps, to 22 fps. Guess I'll have to dial back the settings some.

Does anyone know why load times with Mantle are so awful?

EDIT: Turned off Tesselation and Ambient Occlusion to get my FPS back up into the 40 - 45 fps range. It also seemed to reduce some stuttering I was seeing with DX11. Will either of these have a large impact on the game visuals?

Tessellation quality affects performance greatly, but you can lower it without too much of a quality hit. It affects the polygon count of 3D objects and can dynamically lower quality detail of far away objects. Here's an example of tessellation quality effect on cobblestones:

(Source)

Ambient occlusion is a lighting technique that affects image depth and can improve quality quite a bit. There are two types of ambient occlusion. SSAO is a cheap method that relies entirely on the GPU. HBAO and HBAO+ look better, but are more taxing on the hardware. Because of the quality of your CPU, I'd either stick to SSAO or disable it.

Example

I never managed to fix my own load time issue with Mantle. What I noticed was that it was always initial load that was affected. For instance, travelling to the Hinterlands the first time took a very long time, but if I loaded the area a second time within the same play session it suddenly loaded quickly. I read that you could fix it by removing the Mantle shader cache from the save folder, but that never worked for me.

It's a shame that Mantle support is so bad because it gave me a spectacular performance boost on my old PC. On my current PC it actually runs a bit worse on Mantle. It's especially bad at handling the rain in the Storm Coast area.

I hit the same issue then found a similar article where Origin + Dragon Age as administrator worked.

I had the game installed on an SSD and the loading time was between 2 - 5 minutes. Watching task manager I saw the CPU never got above 10% and the disk above 2% whilst loading.

After setting Origin + Dragon Age Inquisition to run as administrator the loading times are almost instant, a few seconds.