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Can I play Dragon Age 2 in Bootcamp on my particular Mac? Details inside:

DA2 seems to run fine for me on 1440x900 on high settings with AA turned off. Only issues I have are in cut scenes where I get some page tearing (not sure if that's the correct term, like lines running horizontally and the bits below and above it aren't quite in sync with each other), and some of the NPCs are missing some textures on their right shoulder and arm and you can see through them lol. Can cope with that though, runs very smoothly otherwise.

Specs are a 2010 2.66GHz i7 15" MBP, 120GB SSD and 4GB RAM.
 
Ovenall said:
Following up:

On my laptop with the GE Force 8600 card (the rest of the specs are in the first post on this thread) I installed DA2 in Windows XP and have been playing it in Boot Camp.

It defaulted to minimum everything graphics-wise. I upped it to Medium (I can't access High) and the resolution to 1280x800. I even have the antialiasing to 4x. It runs perfectly, and looks really good. I'm sure the Higher res textures are better, but I'm very impressed by how well this game runs. I have played off and on for probably 10 hours and have not had a crash or noticeable bug of any kind.
Click to expand...

I have a similar MBP (early 2008 Penryn 2.5 Ghz, 4 GB RAM, 8600M GT w 512 MB RAM). Upgraded NVIDIA drivers. Running Windows 7 64 bit.

1280 x 720. Low settings. With Fraps reporting, I'm getting 15-27 fps on Low settings (no AA) and an unplayable 7 fps on Medium setting (no AA). How's Overnall's machine able to pull this off and mine not?
 
ninjamoby said:
I have a similar MBP (early 2008 Penryn 2.5 Ghz, 4 GB RAM, 8600M GT w 512 MB RAM). Upgraded NVIDIA drivers. Running Windows 7 64 bit.

1280 x 720. Low settings. With Fraps reporting, I'm getting 15-27 fps on Low settings (no AA) and an unplayable 7 fps on Medium setting (no AA). How's Overnall's machine able to pull this off and mine not?
Click to expand...

Maybe there is a bug with your machine and win7, or your 8600m is starting to fail (which its prone to do anyways..)
 
cluthz said:
Maybe there is a bug with your machine and win7, or your 8600m is starting to fail (which its prone to do anyways..)
Click to expand...

There's nothing I can do about a failing 8600 M but in terms of the possible "bug" with Windows 7, is there a solution?

Reinstall?
 
Just beat the game on 1440x900 Low with no AA.
Overall the game didn't slow down to an unplayable level.. obviously the only time I would get significant slowdown was when there were lots of baddies on screen and I had lots of visible buffs on my characters.
Game was definitely playable and slowdowns didn't bother me.

I did however read someone a comparison of the Boot Camped version and OSX version and the Boot Camped one got about 10 more FPS so take that for what it's worth.
 
ninjamoby said:
There's nothing I can do about a failing 8600 M but in terms of the possible "bug" with Windows 7, is there a solution?

Reinstall?
Click to expand...

If it wouldn't mess up your life or your files too much, I'd say try reinstalling Windows, or re-do the entire Boot Camp partition. Because I have no problems with it set to Medium, and there's no speed difference even if I set it to Low and lower res.

If it's not Windows then yeah it must be your card. Do you have any Mac games you can install in the Mac partition and see if they are suffering too?
 
Ovenall said:
If it wouldn't mess up your life or your files too much, I'd say try reinstalling Windows, or re-do the entire Boot Camp partition. Because I have no problems with it set to Medium, and there's no speed difference even if I set it to Low and lower res.
Click to expand...

Will give this a shot over the weekend - I've found that OSX can be fussy when installing Bootcamp without a complete reinstall and wipe.

I've also tried installing earlier NVIDIA drivers (as recommended on the Bioware forum) for the 8600 GT M, but that didn't lead to any differences in FPS.

I'm thinking it could also be a 64bit Windows 7 issue with DA2.

Ovenall said:
If it's not Windows then yeah it must be your card. Do you have any Mac games you can install in the Mac partition and see if they are suffering too?
Click to expand...

I do have Portal and will check it out to see what FPS I get on OSX.

I think everything else I own is too old to be useful (Diablo II, WC III).
 
Weird, because I updated my driver just a couple days before installing DA2 because I thought it was the smart thing to do.

Please post your results. I'm interested to hear what happens. I'm far from expert at any of this, but I thought a graphics card either "worked" or "didn't work" and that there was no middle ground where it was failing.

Good luck.
 
I think this might be an issue with 64 bit version of Windows 7.

I did a clean install on the MBP early 2008 (8600M GT 512 MB gpu) and still got the 15-26 fps on low 1280x800.

I tried it again on a better machine, late 2008 Unibody with 9600M GT 512 MB gpu, 2.8 C2D, and 4GB ram. Fluxuates now between 15-34 fps on low 1280x800, usually in the low 20s. Drops to 7-18 fps on medium.

Anyone else using Windows 7 64 bit and experiencing any problems?

I know in Mass Effect 2 I had to manual turn on the cores on my processor (to solve a problem with annoying load times) but this graphics issue is quite confusing to me.
 
I've binned my bootcamp partition now (I can take the performance hit of the mac version over having to reboot and need the extra disk space), but it was running fine on windows 7, 64bit before that, on medium.
But, that's on a 2010 13inch MBP. So could be some conflict specific to your GPU and OS.
Have you tried the Mac native version? Bizarrely, that might somehow run better in this case
 
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