Dhruin
SasqWatch
I tripped over these comments on the Dragon Age forums by Lead Principal Programmer Ross Gardner about the performance on single core and low end systems. Although the specs seem reasonable to me, these comments a worth a look if you are running a modest system:
More information.Speaking to the single core questions, the game actually runs OK on a single core depending on the clock speed. We change the threading model slightly to take that into account and Andreas is saying it is about 20% slower, with likely a few dips in a larger heated combat. The min-spec was actually supposed to be an Intel Core 2 (single core) although that is not very clear. If it was a single core though, I'd want to run at higher than 1.4Ghz.
To the older AMD questions I ran the game all through development on the following system:
AMD 64 X2 Dual 4400+ 2.21Ghz w/ 3 gigs of RAM which I assume is DDR 2 without pulling the box apart. I tried and it runs really well on 1.5 Gigs but I constantly had a crapload of other apps running so hence the 3.
The video card I had was a 256MB 7800GT.
OS was XP
I ran on medium settings and the game ran really well - 99% of the time about 20fps and usually between 25-40.
Most of our single core work was done on a similar system with 1 core disabled.
We did a lot of work to make it run on lower end PC's well and if you have the minimum you will have an OK gaming experience. If anything I'd recommend closer to a 2Ghz and above processor before upgrading to a dual core (or a quad) if you can do that cheaply. And before upgrading you should try the game - because it might just surprise you
