Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a radical departure from the current AAA norm of releasing games on PC with half-baked or flat-out broken technical problems. It is polished with a smart user experience, it is smooth running where it counts – and as a PC version should, it offers noticeably higher fidelity than console equivalents, tapping into the strengths of the platform. It’s a game that deserves praise – if not flat-out celebration – in that its execution is just so good, running well on mainstream hardware right up to the best of the best.
The new Dragon Age is based on EA’s proprietary Frostbite engine – but thankfully it has none of the traversal stutters that plagued the Dead Space remake. On first boot, it has a lengthy shader pre-compilation step that takes around four-and-a-half minutes on a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and circa ten minutes on a low-end Ryzen 5 3600. In my experience, this does seem to capture the necessary amount of shaders to have a smooth experience in the game with no intrusive stutter when new effects or objects show up on screen. I prefer a lengthy shader compilation step in the beginning of a game if it reduces intrusive shader compilation stutters. Nixxes has an approach of asynchronously compiling shaders on the fly, but this adds to the overall CPU burden during gaming – and is especially impactful on lower-end CPUs. Ultimately, I feel that BioWare has made the right call here.
The end result is that our veteran Ryzen 5 3600 actually maintains a healthy 60fps in nearly every scene in the game, with only a handful of dips below that target. Frame-rate capping or using v-sync triple-buffers the experience and lessens the burden on the CPU, ensuring smoother play.
Smoothness defines the user experience in the game, as well as the best-in-class menu system and options. BioWare has elected to use a brilliant menu system where you can edit the graphical options and see the impact on visuals and performance change in real-time – perfect for tuning. Only two options require a restart: textures and level of detail, but otherwise, the system is robust. There’s a helpful VRAM meter as well, along with explanations of how each setting impacts the sub-components of your system. BioWare goes heavy on very useful features: I love the adjustable dynamic resolution scaling option, allowing you to get the best image quality possible at your desired frame-rate. I also love the explicit multi scaler: for example, you can set the game to 4K, select DLSS quality and then set the resolution scale to 67 percent. This sets up an 835p internal resolution, reconstructed with DLSS to 1440p, with the GPU then delivering a simple upscale to 4K – but with a 4K user interface. This kind of double-scaling is often used on consoles and allows for a reasonable presentation on high resolution screens when using a more modest GPU. You can even go in the other direction, downsampling from a resolution scale above 100 percent – and you can add reconstruction to that.