Dragon Age: Veilguard's PC port is polished, efficient, and goes far beyond console quality

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a radical departure from the current AAA norm of releasing PC games with half-baked or completely broken technical issues. It's polished with a smart user experience, runs smoothly where it counts, and, as a PC version should, offers noticeably higher fidelity than its console counterparts, playing to the platform's strengths. It's a game that deserves praise, if not outright celebration, because it's executed so well and runs well on mainstream hardware with the best of the best.

The new Dragon Age is based on EA's proprietary Frostbite engine, but thankfully has none of the traversal stutters that plagued the Dead Space remake. On first boot, you have a long shader precompile step that takes around four and a half minutes on a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and around ten minutes on a lower-end Ryzen 5 3600. In my experience, this seems to capture the necessary amount of shaders to have a smooth in-game experience without intrusive stutters when new effects or objects appear on the screen. I prefer a long shader compilation step at the beginning of a game if it reduces intrusive shader compilation stutters. Nixxes has an asynchronous on-the-fly shader compilation approach, but this increases the overall CPU load during gameplay and has a particular impact on low-end CPUs. Ultimately, I think BioWare made the right decision.

The end result is that our veteran Ryzen 5 3600 actually maintains a healthy 60fps in almost all game scenes, with only a handful of dips below that goal. Frame rate limiting or using v-sync triple buffering improves the experience and reduces CPU load, ensuring smoother gameplay.

Fluidity defines the user experience in the game, as well as the best-in-class menu and options system. BioWare has chosen to use a brilliant menu system where you can edit graphical options and see the impact on visual and performance changes in real time, perfect for making adjustments. Only two options require a reboot: textures and level of detail, but otherwise the system is robust. There's also a useful VRAM meter, along with explanations of how each setting affects the subcomponents of your system. BioWare relies on very useful features: I love the adjustable dynamic resolution scaling option, which allows you to get the best possible image quality at the 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 scaling to 67 percent. This sets up an internal resolution of 835p, rebuilt with DLSS to 1440p, and then the GPU offers a simple upscaling to 4K, but with a 4K UI. This type of dual scaling is often used on consoles and allows for reasonable rendering on high-resolution displays when using a more modest GPU. You can even go the other direction, downsampling from a resolution scale higher than 100 percent, and you can add reconstruction to that.

I'm also impressed that BioWare offers significant scaling beyond the console versions. This occurs essentially in three areas. With the right hardware, image quality and performance improve, delivering a sharper, more stable image at a higher frame rate. This is normal, but the biggest gains come from environments like terrain decoration, which controls the number of objects scattered like plants, rocks, and more around the world.

The increases in ray tracing fidelity are perhaps the biggest improvement. The PC has a 'selective' option that only activates RT when the game has the performance to handle it, but perhaps the mode should be called 'highly selective' because few scenes use it. The PC allows you to use RT ambient occlusion and RT reflections at all times. In addition to this, the game has an ultra setting with numerous improvements, albeit at an expected performance cost. My only criticism is that RTAO needs to be more scalable, with support for longer ray distance, as at the moment it seems quite short, making many scenes look quite flat.

Optimized settings? We can look towards the PS5 version to get an idea of ​​how BioWare sees itself scaling things up, but ultimately there are several configurations that are customized for the consoles and cannot be matched. Dynamic resolution scaling should be at the top of your list for optimized setups, and it's no surprise that consoles use it a lot. However, its effects can change depending on the climber. I can't get it to work with XeSS because it seems like an older version of the technology is being used. However, DLSS works, but its minimum limit is always 50 percent, while FSR can go lower in the most extreme cases. If you try to use Nvidia DLAA, DRS doesn't work, which makes sense if you think about it: it focuses solely on anti-aliasing, rather than upscaling.

As for ray tracing, you need to modify it depending on your hardware. RT enabled isn't exactly very heavy, but increasing the resolution of RT reflections increases the load. RT ambient occlusion? Due to the low beam distance and little shade, it's really not worth it.

On the CPU side, Zen 2 can pretty much hack it, but it won't lock you to 60fps or higher. That's a job for Zen 3 or equivalent Intel parts. Your next stop should be the quality of the landscaping. This changes the amount of vegetation, rocks, twigs and leaves scattered throughout the more open sections of the game and has a noticeable impact on performance in ultra: around four to five percent, depending on the scene. I recommend high settings for optimized settings to ensure the most open areas of the game run as well as possible.

The detail level should also be reduced to high for a similar reason: it offers a small performance increase, while the medium and low settings eliminate a lot of mid-to-far geometry. Interestingly, this level of detail also affects the quality of the shadows cast by the trees. Since I don't recommend RTAO, what type of HBAO should I use? The full setup obviously offers more coverage and higher contrast, but in the end, SSAO is a gimmick and it's hard to know which is more physically accurate. So it depends on taste, but for what it's worth, consoles use the 'HBAO full' option.

Post-processing settings control the quality of motion blur and depth of field. Ultra resolves bokeh shapes much better than the settings below, at a considerable cost of almost 11 percent over the medium or high settings, but as far as I see it, the medium and high settings are similar and also in line with PS5 . Lighting quality is another simple win as it controls the quality of shadows. Going down from ultra to high only introduces a subtle loss of quality in the shadows, while medium and low produce obvious quality reductions, no matter how high you go.

Optimized High settings should be good for 30-40 fps on RTX 30/40 series cards. GPUs with 10-12 GB of VRAM can increase the quality of textures. PS5 quality configurations not included in the list have not been tested.

Beyond that, don't touch other settings, such as hair strands. Yes, some performance can be saved from scene to scene with this feature disabled, but it's such a great feature that it should be left enabled unless your kit really can't handle it. Interestingly, settings like sky quality and volumetric quality have very little measurable impact on performance, and I had trouble discerning differences between quality levels when toggled, even after restarting the game.

VFX quality, terrain quality… just crank them up to the max. However, texture quality is important if you have an 8GB GPU. At 1440p, the maximum settings are off the table and there are also visual issues on high where some textures don't seem to load, looking worse than medium. So I would recommend a medium level, but consider trying a high level for a less aggressive transmission.

In short, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is an excellent PC port, which is truly rare. It works well, adapts nicely and elegantly to various levels of hardware and the menu system is an absolute joy. I can only recommend some minor improvements, but ultimately BioWare has done an excellent job with this game. Honestly, I wish more games were released in as good a condition as this one.