New Dragon Age 2 Patch, nVidia Driver Crash

Sometimes it seems like so much energy is funneled into powering the great crucible that is E3, the rest of the industry shuts down from the glare.  Not so, as the team at Bioware was using this last week to complete certification of the new 1.03 patch for the PC version of Dragon Age II.  It’s a big one, too: beyond the expected selection of specific item tweaks and quest-specific bug fixes, the patch notes boast an across-the-board rebalancing effort with dozens of tweaks influencing party skills, enemy types, and combat pacing at various difficulties.

On an apparently unrelated note, however, the patch has been posted with some cautionary advice for gamers with nVidia-based graphics cards:

On June 1, nVidia released their new 275.33 drivers. We have confirmed that these drivers can cause a 100% reproducible crash for some users. Although Dragon Age II PC Patch 1.03 was released around the same time, this specific crash is driver-specific and is unrelated to the patch.

We are working with nVidia to ensure they correct the issue in their drivers. In the meantime, affected users are advised to roll their nVidia drivers back to the 270.61 version to correct the problem.

This would not be the first issue Dragon Age II has had with specific nVidia drivers, as the game suffered from severe graphical corruption and single-digit framerates when set to maximum quality settings using the 266.58 drivers available at the game’s release.  Here’s hoping nVidia and Bioware can pin down a fix for the crash soon.

You can grab the new 1.03 patch straight from the Bioware site, or check out the full list of fixes and balance tweaks by clicking the Press Release button below.

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