[PC] Dragon Age: Car Origins

Yes, my cpu is overclocked 900mhz It's rock solid though, tested the P95 for 24 hours, my problems in the past with ocing has been trying to squeeze a few more mhz out of it.
If my OC is stable in P95 then it's stable in any app imo, since it stresses the cpu the most out of any app.
If the game continues to be prone to crashes though I will back the clocks off a tad and see if it makes a difference.

 

Well, then, that's probably the culprit. Amount of stress isn't important. What is important is which parts of the overclocked hardware are stressed. It may well be that P95 just doesn't make use of some parts of the CPU that Dragon Age does, and Dragon Age just makes use of those parts that happen to be unable to handle the higher clock rate.

 

I'm skeptical of that.
Especially I've googled the issue and many others have the same problem.

 

Heh-Heh...When I first read this I thought I saw "overclocked to 900MHz" and then I thought, "That seems a bit slow these days," and then I reread it the way you wrote it! WoW! Almost a 1GHz overclock!

I have to agree with Chalnoth--there's just no way that you can troubleshoot this problem, or any software problem you may have, without backing off 900MHz on that cpu...

That's the weird thing about overclocking--some things will run *perfectly* in an overclocked environment, which leads a person to believe that *everything should* run OK under the overclock. Years ago I was amazed to see how quickly problems I had believed beyond solving--problems I had convinced myself were because of bugs in certain games or applications--*completely* disappeared the minute I set all of my clocks back to stock speeds. It was a lesson I've never forgotten. What I learned through my own experience was that sometimes a software program will tolerate a cpu overclock, but fail with a gpu overclock--or on the same system another program would fail with a cpu overclock but tolerate a gpu overclock--while still other programs would seem to run perfectly with one or both overclocked. It happens this way because the parts we buy are only *validated* and tested to run correctly at their default frequencies--and no other frequencies. So, a cpu that doesn't validate at, say, 3GHz, might pass validation with flying colors at 2.6GHz, and so is sold that way. Same with gpus, with ram, with anything. The only MHz speeds that are guaranteed by the manufacturers are the default, shipping clocks.

I mean, these days--really--what's the point of overclocking when everything is already running at such high frequencies to begin with? I will confess that even today 900MHz is one HELL of an overclock--no doubt about it... But at the same time, I do think this is most likely the source of your problem. You can't be sure, though, until you throttle back to stock and check it out.

 

I've had crashing issues in the past with applications when P95 was perfectly stable on an OC'd CPU. So that doesn't mean much really other than giving a false sense of security.

Other than a somewhat random memory leak that takes hours to manifest, Dragon Age has been rock solid for me.

That isn't to say the code is clean of bugs. A friend of mine with an Nvidia GPU had crashes in fullscreen (I never did on an ATI GPU) but never crashes in windowed mode for instance. Then again, is this the fault of the game or the video card drivers? No clue...

Then again, there isn't a single game on the market that is 100% bugfree.

Regards,
SB

 

I think it's more likely the video driver. I've yet to work on a PC game where we didn't have to work around driver bugs. And it not happening in windowed mode points to that.
Having said that it could be an overheating video card, and there is no harm in putting things at standard clocks to see if it resolves the issue.

I've had a few problems in 60 hours but most just leave the game in an unplayable state. I've certainly never had it blue screen.

 

I only have an Opteron 165, 1.8Ghz dual core, 2.7ghz is a typical overclock of them, being server chips they obviously are more thoroughly tested. I figure, by going over S939 vs Am2 reviews that's about equal to an athlon x2 5000+, so I'm cpu limited unless I run FSAA in most games.
I've been running this chip at 2.7ghz for most of it's life, I have a 99% guarantee it's not the CPU that's the problem.

 

My system is overclocked a bit (2.66GHz -> 3.2) but that ain't the problem. Switched back to stock and got the same crash at the same time (choosing a response in the first conversation with Branka).

Like I said before, switching to windowed mode fixed it but is a PITA in its own right (screen tearing, moving mouse to edge of screen doesn't scroll).

Eagerly awaiting a patch to fix this and dagger damage. Bonus points for helmet toggle.

 

That doesn't surprise me at all. Here's my explanation, that I think is fairly likely to be true:

Transistors within a CPU switch at a specific rate, based upon their specific dimensions and makeup. These dimensions and makeup change slightly from transistor to transistor based upon simple noise in the fabrication process. So, if you take any specific data line within the processor, data will traverse the line within some fixed amount of time, and that amount of time will vary from processor to processor based upon this noise in manufacturing.

Now, when you run a processor at a particular clock rate, it's got lines through which data goes, and it's got sort of "stopping points" where data sits while it's waiting for the next clock cycle. The time it takes the data to go from one stopping point to the next sets the maximum clock rate, but this amount of time varies from place to place in the processor. If your processor is run at a higher rate, then the data for some of the lines won't reach their stopping points in time, which causes it to get out of sync with the other data lines, which causes errors, which can cause a crash.

Whether it does actually cause a crash or not, of course, depends upon whether or not those specific data lines are used, or even whether or not it's okay if they're out of sync by a clock cycle or two. So it's perfectly natural for some programs to cause crashes while others do not.

Of course, at higher temperatures, transistors also tend to switch more slowly, so you can't reach quite as high of clock rates. Thus general stress on the system can bring on a crash just from increasing the temp, and overclocking the system would only make this more likely.

 

Please bear in mind that we're talking about system crashes, not program crashes. Simple crashes to desktop are much more likely to be caused by the software in question, though it is still up in the air as to the specific cause.

 

Seconded. Maybe some kind soul somewhere on the internet will make a user mod for that. As some of the best helmets are also some of the fugliest.

Regards,
SB

 

But do you realize I haven't been able to repeat the system crash? Until/if it happens again you guys can go for pages about it, but I feel you guys are taking my issue a bit to seriously. Lets talk about the game, not what may or may not be going on with my pc

Did you miss the link 1 or two pages ago? Someone posted a link to a user created patch which fixes dagger damage.

 

Is there a good chance the unofficial patch will make it into an official one

 

Heh, I should have edited more out. I was replying specifically to the suggestion of a helmet toggle.

Regards,
SB

 

That "fix" has some nasty side effects.
http://dragonage.gulbsoft.org/doku.php/hotfix/dexterity_hotfix_101#fn__1

 

I started playing this yesterday with a human warrior. It definitely feels quite hard on normal. The first big troll guy was giving me hard time, I beat him by running away with one guy and it keep trying to catch me for a while, after it focused on someone else, I started to run away with that character.

Also in the Redcliffe castle, the room that has 5 Mabari dogs was major pain in the ass, they kept owning me like grazy, even after I went out to change my party members and get some potions, sadly I wasn't able to find many potions. I had absolutely no chance against the dogs, until I took my party in to a nearby room and then went solo with my character, lured the dogs in to the room, and right after three of them were inside the room, I closed the door and then it was easy. I have had to resort to similar weird tactics in other battles as well...

Despite the difficulties I'm liking it so far, the story seems interesting and you can do missions in different ways. The conversation seems a bit worse than in Mass Effect, I often feel like the characters respond strangely to my choices, like they heard something else than what I said. I never had that feeling with Mass Effect. I quess there is so much more situations in this game, that it would be very hard to keep the same level in that regard.

I hope my characters won't feel so wussies after a little while.

 

There's a weapon editor in a trainer out there that does the same thing. Made my broadsword into an uberweapon and spent the next 3 minutes wondering why me and my opponent couldn't land a blow on each other. Finally figured out that the "fix" applied to all weapons and I'd jacked up the armor rating so high we couldn't hit each other.

 

The dude has updated his texture mod for DAO. Really good IMO.

http://www.dragonagenexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=15

 

The game is hard until

Spoiler

you realize Cone of Cold is cruise control for cool.

 

Heh, my first playthrough I avoided that whole line of spells, except the first one because it's insta-hit damage.

Will probably have to wait til my 5th playthrough (3rd mage playthrough) to play with that line.

Regards,
SB