Dragon Age: Veilguard Crashes within a minute

After a lot of testing, I think I found something that helps with cpu-based instability: reduce minimum processor state in your windows power plan settings to 95% or generally anything below 100%, make sure your fans/aio are tuned aggressively, if you have a hybrid processor (intel 12th gen and onwards) use process lasso to free the e-cores. Maintaining your cpu cool should help with crashes. For performance, load into the game and give it 10 or so minutes for it to get any missing shader work out of the way.

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I had the game not only crash on me, but also crash my entire computer, consistently, on startup. I updated my drivers, deleted shader cache, and neither of these helped. I then updated my BIOS, which allowed me to run the game long enough to discover that there's a bug in the startup sequence that maxes out CPU usage across all cores. I discovered it through a combination of HWMonitor, which showed my CPU hitting 100C during shader compilation, which makes no sense, and then through ProcessLasso I observed how Veilguard was maxing out all of my cores. I proceeded to limit the process to only half of my performance cores, and this got the game to chill out. I then opened up the other half of perf cores but the game retained a reasonable amount of CPU usage.

So far I've been able to build shaders, change settings in the menu, and create my char. Now, going through the initial sequence (at the bar), I notice that the game seems excessively CPU-bound, with AVG FPS < 50, and really bad frame-pacing with 1% lows in the low 20s, seeing about 80% GPU usage and a sizeable >40% CPU usage. This is especially strange as I have graphics maxed out without DLSS, so I'd expect to see a lot more GPU usage. Even with the game paused as I type this I'm seeing CPU bouncing between 40% and 50% which is unbelievable considering that, well, the game's paused. Hopefully the team can figure out what's going on with the CPU load.

Edit 1: added a screenshot of tanking performance with low GPU and high CPU usage...will play more with the settings later

Edit 2: dropped graphics settings to low. Performance is not a lot better. I guess I'm getting 13 more frames, but I don't see how this game demands so much from my CPU and still only delivers 45 frames. Meanwhile my process lasso shows my CPU getting slammed constantly, and HWMonitor has >90C spikes left and right. No other game does this.

Edit 3: I didn't notice the BIOS update reset all my settings, so I went back in and managed to squeeze a bit better performance. However the CPU kept getting hammered. After a while, performance got better, CPU dropped to mid 40%, and my FPS managed to comfortably linger around 60fps, at times exceeding 70. However, the CPU keeps getting randomly hammered, resulting in crazy temps and performance drops. Someone else mentioned here that we might be seeing shader-related issues, and I think that's what's going on here: there's missing shaders and the game's compiling them at-runtime like there's no tomorrow. It would explain why performance almost doubles after letting the game sit for an hour, but randomly degrades as new content appears.

My specs are thus:

• OS: Win11 Pro
• CPU: i9-12900k
• RAM: 64GB DDR4
• GPU: RTX 4090
• Mainboard: Asus ROG Strix Z690-A
• Display: 4k @ 144hz (capped at 120hz)
• None of my parts are OC'd outside default