Running Dragon Age Inquisition on HP Envy m6-k010dx 15.6" Sleekbook
Here's my recommendations on settings using this laptop or similar hardware. I've put in 83+ hours or so first playthrough and have been constantly optimizing and finding ways to enrich my experience so hopefully this will help you get the most out of your hardware as well. I'm making adjustments as I'm playing so this will change. Testing out beta 6 patch, and everything is pretty smooth so far. Some changes to recommendations since Patch 5 is out and it's fixed quite a bit.
*updated as of 3/15/15
I found a very informative article on how some of the settings affect performance in DAI. It also has some useful tips as well.
Use the following settings for the game. Make sure you have the game patched to current and using AMD Omega 14.12 drivers (latest on AMD's website)
Disable Origin ingame overlay, Play with Origin in offline mode. Obviously you have to be online for multiplayer but I've not played that as it is irrelevant to single player campaign. Don't play in windowed mode. Hit alt+enter to go into fullscreen or play in windowed fullscreen.
I average 24-36 fps in most areas, with some exceptions like Redcliffe where it drops to 15-25 fps and the Intro where you wake up in Haven. It goes down to 14-21 fps with all the people around. The cutscenes are smooth for the most part and doesn't stutter much.
Display : 1280x720 60HZ V-Sync : on
Graphics:
Resolution scale: 100
Mesh quality: low ( scars/freckles/hair gloss is no longer tied to mesh, and this helped performance a lot)
Tesselation quality: off
Texture quality: very low (Almost zero difference between low and very low)
Shadow quality: low
Terrain quality: low
Vegetation quality: low
Water quality: low
Post process quality: low
Ambient Occulusion: off
Effects quality: low
Post process anti aliasing: off
Multisample anti aliasing: off
Shader quality: high (tied to scars/freckles/hair gloss, this seems to utilize more gpu instead of cpu crushing mesh quality)
I've eliminated use of customized user.cfg as this seems to be no longer necessary.
I also no longer have sound stutter issues after setting texture to very low from low so it seems I was correct about CPU sensitivity.
Advantage of very low textures is that it gets rid of lot of glossy objects, and I personally feel it looks better. The game also runs 3-5 fps higher as well.
