Unfortunately, straight off the bat with using mobile GPUs, and whilst they've come on leaps and bounds, you're utilizing shared system RAM so in terms of speed and efficiency you're down from native DDR5 VRAM.
I run the game on a tower, on Ultra with post-process and AA tuned down, just to make sure I sit under my 780 SC ACX SLI 3GB VRAM cap and by being 10% comfortably underneath, with all my rig running on high performance SSDs, OS/Pagefile/game separated, with 32GB of 1866 RAM, the game runs awfully. The tutorial boss fight was unmanagable, through a combination of bad controls, no tactical view worth a damn and chugging performance.
So sadly I'd have to agree that you'd be looking at a fairly hefty reduction in fidelity in order to get something playable, though obviously that can vary from person to person. My threshold is fairly low.
Maybe Bioware can further optimize, with help from Nvidia but basically its completely out of our hands right now. Fingers crossed time.
On ultra settings without tesselation, shadows on high, AO on SSAO, post processing on high and no AA (and display @120Hz), the game benchmark mode gives me a minimum framerate of 35 and an average framerate of 50 (with some spikes at well above 70)
The problem is, the in game benchmark DOES NOT reflect the reality of the game in open zones such as the Hinterlands, or the Coast... In these zones, with the afore mentionned settings, not always but quite often i drop at around 20~30 as my AVERAGE fps. And if there's a fight involving many enemies, wall of fire, poison cloud, etc... i sometimes get pretty chunky fps.
I have to lower to settings to high (except for the textures that i keep on ultra), with no tesselation, no AO, no post processing and no AA (display @120Hz) to actually get a smooth fps at all time.
I might have been a bit naive perhaps, but when i ordered that computer, i was under the impression that minus a few options that i would need to turn off, i could run any next gen game on ultra without breaking a sweat.
Oh well...
Anyway, i looked around on the net to find a comprehensive graphics tweaking guide for the game that would explain which option does what and how much it impacts the performance, but i haven't found any.
Anyone could give me a link to such a site, if any, so that i can optimize the game graphics better?
Thanks.
The problem isn't necessarily just on your side. The game is horribly built on PC, so no amount of tweaking or settings changes may make a huge difference.
I think this is one thing that Bioware is going to have to step in and fix. I refuse to play the game right now as its badly marring my enjoyment, even without all the other stuff that needs addressing.
All this being said, though, i was pretty surprised by the lack of quality difference between low preset and ultra preset in this video i found:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q70DxlW0nb0
I was shocked to find out that between the 2, at least in that video, the game is like 90% the exact same.
