Dragon Age: Inquisition Benchmarked
For the original German article, see here.
Engine
As mentioned before, BioWare uses the Frostbite 3 Engine made by DICE for Dragon Age: Inquisition. This engine has proven itself in the past in Battlefield 4 and offers a multitude of modern features, such as, tessellation and HBAO, which is nice to have. The textures, shadows and even the lighting of the game are impressive. Tessellation creates a very plastic object structure. The water, vegetation and level details are all good. Many rooms indoors are decorates extensively and the package is rounded off with well-animated, engrossing characters.
The biggest highlight of this game would be the quality of its effects. If one were to zoom in and pausing while fighting, one would notice the unusually high quality light beams, sparks and explosions. Few RPGs can claim to have such amazing effects. The well-designed story and beautiful world are sure to enrapture the gamer.
The variety of options available is impressive. Bioware has really given the gamer the freedom to tailor the game performance to meet their needs. The graphics option offers more than 10 options and four presets ("Low", "Medium", "High" and "Ultra") which automatically set all the menu options. At max, the game activates 2x MSAA which smooths the edges significantly.
Owners of AMD GPUs are happy about the Mantle support (DirectX @Nvidia). While Mantle improves performance at high settings minimally (+4 % @Radeon R9 280X, +8 % @Radeon R9 M290X), it ensures that AMD GPUs can sprint ahead of otherwise faster Nvidia GPUs at low or medium settings (see table). However, in our experience, this boost comes in exchange for longer load times.
Dragon Age refuses to start with Intel GPUs. Thankfully, there is an easy fix: right-click on the desktop and choose the "Graphics Settings". In the graphics options, pick the "3D" menu, and there change the CMAA option from "Deactivate" to "Overwrite program settings". Once finished, the game should run but the problem remains that the Intel chips are far too weak to run this game. Neither the HD Graphics 3000 nor the HD Graphics 4000 or 4600 could provide more than an average of 25 fps. Furthermore, changing the settings will require a restart and the game is known to freeze with some settings.
Benchmark
The recording software, Fraps, does not run with Mantle mode so we were forced to use the internal benchmark, which is far from optimal. The duration of the benchmark depends on the system performance and the test runs very high quality scenes, which are not part of the usual gameplay. All-in-all, a result of 25+ fps on this relatively hard internal benchmark means that the game will run well on the laptop, particularly as Inquisition will be played from the third person camera and not an Ego shooter one. Tip: the Mantle results vary by a few percent so we let the benchmark run 2-3x on our AMD chips and took the best score. The performance is very consistent in DirectX mode.
Results
Like many other engines (CryEngine 4, id Tech 5), the Frostbite 3 engine does scales little as settings are lowered. As such, even at minimum details, the game looks decent and should not overtax weaker laptops. For low settings, we recommend a middle-class graphics card: the GeForce GT 740M provides a good 35 fps with a resolution of 1,024 x 768 pixels. A resolution of 1,366 x 768 pixels and the "Medium" preset are much harder on the system and require a GeForce GT 750M and up to be on the safe side.
A powerful GPU is required for high details and the FHD resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels. A GeForce GTX 860M or GTX 770M can run the game with these settings at 25 fps. Max settings are only recommended for high-end GPUs, like the Radeon R9 M290X or the GeForce GTX 870M/780M. The CPU is hardly a factor in these cases as the GPU is often the deciding factor how well a game runs.
| Dragon Age: Inquisition | |
| 1920x1080 Ultra Graphics Quality AA:2x MS 1920x1080 High Graphics Quality 1366x768 Medium Graphics Quality 1024x768 Low Graphics Quality | |
| GeForce GTX 980, 3770K | |
| Radeon R9 280X, 3770K | |
| GeForce GTX 880M, 4700MQ | |
| GeForce GTX 780M, 4700MQ | |
| Radeon R9 M290X, 4700MQ | |
| GeForce GTX 870M, 4700MQ | |
| GeForce GTX 770M, 4700MQ | |
| GeForce GTX 860M, 4700MQ | |
| GeForce GTX 850M, 4340M | |
| GeForce GTX 765M, 4700MQ | |
| GeForce GT 750M, 4702MQ | |
| Radeon R7 512 Cores (Kaveri Desktop), A10-7850K, Samsung SSD 470 Series MZ-5PA256/EU | |
| GeForce GT 740M, 4200M | |
| GeForce GT 640M, 2637M, Lite-On LMT-256M3M | |
| GeForce GT 720M, 4200M, WDC Scorpio Blue WD10JPVX-22JC3T0 | |
| Radeon HD 8650G, A10-5750M, Samsung SSD 470 Series MZ-5PA256/EU | |
| HD Graphics 4600, 4700MQ | |
| GeForce GT 630M, 3720QM, Seagate Momentus 7200.5 ST9750420AS | |
| Iris Graphics 5100, 4258U, Apple SSD SM0256F | |
Test Systems
Four of our test models come from Schenker Technologies (mysn.de):
- W504 (Core i7-4700MQ, 8 GB DDR3, GeForce GTX 860M, GTX 870M, GTX 880M, Radeon R9 M290X)
- W503 (Core i7-4700MQ, 8 GB DDR3, GeForce GTX 765M, GTX 770M, GTX 780M)
- M504 (Core i5-4340M, 8 GB DDR3, GeForce GTX 850M)
- M503 (Core i7-4702MQ, 8 GB DDR3, GeForce GT 750M)
These notebooks have Windows 7 64 bit installed.
Nvidia provided a few test models as well:
- HP Envy 15-j011sg (Core i5-4200M, 12 GB DDR3, GeForce GT 740M)
- MSI CX61-i572M281BW7 (Core i5-4200M, 8 GB DDR3, GeForce GT 720M)
- Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M3-581TG (Core i7-2637M, 4GB DDR3, Geforce GT 640M)
Intel added one more:
- Schenker S413 (Core i7-4750HQ, 8 GB DDR3, Iris Pro Graphics 5200)
The desktop PCs use CPUs/APUs from Intel and AMD, SSDs from Micron, Intel and Samsung, Mainboards from Intel and Asus as well as graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD.
GPU drivers: Nvidia 344.75, AMD 14.11.2 Beta, Intel 10.18.10.3960
Overview
