Forum Discussion

Re: Improving Inquisition load times

If you're running on the Mantle API, disable that ASAP. Mantle dramatically increases load times. For comparison, loading the Hinterlands takes me 18 seconds on DirectX but 2 minutes on Mantle. I run the game off an SSD.

Edit: Updating my old thread to add that you should also enable Origin in-game and make sure you're not capping your framerate with RivaTuner.

3 Replies

  • Jhelzei's avatar
    Jhelzei
    9 years ago

    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?

  • Fred_vdp's avatar
    Fred_vdp
    Hero+
    9 years ago

    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.