Dragon Age Inquisition refuses to use GPU and runs slow.
I recently built a new pc. My CPU (Intel Pentium processor G3258) exceeds the recommended 3.0 GHz, my GPU (R9 270x) exceeds the recommended R9 270, and my memory (HyperX Fury) meets the recommended 8 gigs of RAM. Despite all of this the game crawls out the gate on startup at less than 1 FPS (Updating 1 frame every 5 or so seconds) regardless of graphics settings (Changed through Raptr's optimization for quality/performance/balance, since navigating menus takes multiple minutes to even reach the graphics/display options). My CPU is stressed to its limit at 100% locking any other process running in the background, and my GPU doesn't seem to be pulling its weight at all. During 'gameplay' it jumps up to about 30-60 as my GPU starts getting involved, stuttering every 2 seconds, and inevitably crashing after a few minutes. I've tried lowering the resolution, disabling antivirus, running as admininstrator (Both Origin and Inquisition), running windowed, changing from Direct3D 11 to AMD Mantle rendering and this issue persists throughout it all. All drivers are properly installed, directx11 is up to date my amd catalyst drivers are up to date, even the game itself is updated. I installed Bound By Flame on Steam to see if it was purely a hardware issue, and it drew proper use of GPU and CPU with stellar performance. This leads me to believe that it's either Frostbite 3 giving me the issue or Origin itself, but why not post it here in DA:I section too?
I've run out of things to try, simply put. I need more ideas. Straight out solutions are applicable as well. Thanks in advance.
Oh I also can't connect to the Dragon Age network either. Pity!
I've found a sort of workaround for my specific issue. Being as brief and detailed as possible I'll just give the steps I used to get the game playable:
1) Set your power plan (Found under Power Options in the Control Panel) to High Performance
2) Download Extreme Injector v3.3 (by master131, that will help you find it) and properly install it for use on DAI (Move it into DAI directory)
3) Launch Origin (As administrator, just in case), go into Offline Mode
4) Launch Extreme Injector v3.3 as administrator
5) Click "Add DLL" and add all 3 available files (d3dcompiler_46, dbdata and Engine.BuildInfo_Win64_retail) and make sure they're checked off in the list
6 Launch DragonAgeInquisition.exe as administrator (Found by default in c:/program files(x86)/origin games/dragon age inquisition)
7) Next to Process Name click Select (Make sure DAI is fully running, meaning the window has shown up on the taskbar) and find DragonAgeInquisition (Should be at the very bottom) then quickly hit "Inject" (I get an error message before it says it's injected properly, don't worry as long as it works)
The main menu will still be incredibly slow and I crash to desktop after around 40 minutes but at least it 'works.' I get a good constant framerate of ~50, dropping to 5 every few seconds for a small amount of time, and periodically locking up but at least it 'works.' Despite it 'not supporting dual cores' I can run the game perfectly fine during gameplay (Stalling seems to go down exponentially outside of cutscenes, though light stuttering still occurs). I don't recommend this as it's truly no way to play through the game and it still crashes to desktop unprompted. Disabling Origin Overlay could fix some crashing to desktop (without error messages) if that's what you experience. I recommend simply upgrading your computer to a quad core as that appears to be the issue.
