So, I've been playing since launch, but my performance dropped off a cliff on or around the 20th December. When I first got the game, I was playing on an old machine. Specs: Intel Core i7 930 2.8Ghz - quite an ancient i7, about 4 years old. 6GB RAM DDR3 at 1600Mhz Radeon HD6870 Corsair Hyrdo H50 Cooler Windows was running on an 128 GB OCZ SSD, whilst the game was running from a Seagate 500GB SATA3 HDD Windows 7 64bit So, this setup couldn't manage to run the game fantastically, and I ended up scaling the resolution down to 1440x900, which at least gave me something in the stable 35-40 fps range. I would get occasional crashes to desktop without error message, but never lost much progress. Now, before I completed my first run through the game, I upgraded to my new machine. Arrived on the 8th, and I installed DA:I straight away. Specs: Intel Core i7-4790k @ 4Ghz 16 GB DDR3 at 1600Mhz Radeon R9 285 Corsair Hydro H55 Cooler Kingston V300 240 GB SSD Windows 8.1 64bit At first, performance was excellent. I was running everything at Ultra and at 1920x1080, with frame rates comfortably at 60. The patch on the 9th December that seemed to break the game for everyone here gave me no issue. I finished my play through sometime around the 15th December, and immediately started another one. On the 20th, with my new save at about 17 hours into the game (I had just arrived in the Fallow Mire), I fired up the game and found it barely getting above 12fps. I had made no changes to my system at all. Even setting the game to Low and putting the resolution back down to 1440x900 made no difference. I tried other games, all of which ran fine. I rolled back to a previous System Restore point, but this made no difference. An upgrade of graphics drivers made no difference. The start menu where the mages and templars are walking towards Haven claims to run at 60fps (according to my fraps counter) but it slows down and speeds up every few seconds. Since I have two systems capable of running the game, I loaded up my old machine, applied the patches, and the game ran as it normally did on that machine - 35-40fps @ 1440x900. So the question is; How can performance stay the same on an old machine, but degrade so completely on a brand new machine that should (and has proven that it can) run it perfectly?
