Dragon Age has taken over my life.
As I had posted last month, I built my first computer from scratch. So far it has performed exceptionally well for media playback. As soon as I had all of my media players configured and codecs installed, my computer handled 1080P HD Playback flawlessly. The next phase of my testing was to determine the gaming capabilities of a relatively current game.
I purchased Dragon Age about a month ago. I won’t go into too much detail about the game itself, but it’s a great game. Initially I setup the game on it’s highest settings which would be 1080P resolution, high texture, anti-aliasing, and high graphics. The game was playable, but it lagged quite a bit which was a major pain. Inevitably I gradually lowered the settings to see how much my system could handle where I could play the game comfortably. I’ve lowered the resolution to 720P, textures to low, anti-aliasing off, and graphics details to low.
Overall, I’m a bit disappointed in how poorly my system handles games, but at the same time I’m not surprised. Nowhere has atom/ion been advertised as a gaming processor. So I still say my system does well in what it was intended to do, which was be my HTPC. It functions perfectly running Windows Media Center, and I can still game at low settings if I choose.
Still, I might have my family inherit this computer once I start my next build sometime next year. I’m looking to go Quad Core i7 this time around.
