Dragon Age: The Veilguard May Have Set A New Standard For PC Optimization And Ease Of Use

Digital Foundry has shared an interesting report on their PC performance test for Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

To their own surprise, they are effusive in praise for the game’s brilliant state upon launch, in an era where we had gotten used to games launching incomplete or needing a day one patch.

In their own words:

“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.”

But what did BioWare do that made them earn this praise? On one level, they managed to get the game to do its own assessment of your PC specs and optimize itself appropriately. That includes loading up the shaders the minute you boot the game, and while you may have to wait for it, that’s work you didn’t have to look for and do yourself.

Digital Foundry also reported on this:

 “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.”

They then give an example, where you set the game quality to 4K, using DLSS, and a resolution scale of 67 %. The game set internal resolution at 835p, using DLSS to upscale to 1440p, and then using the GPU to bring it up to 4K. But on top of that, the game’s UIs are scaled separately to 4K.

If you are a tweaker, Digital Foundry recommends you pay particular attention to ray tracing. Of course, higher ray tracing settings led to significantly harder workloads for your PC build. But you can also choose a selective mode which will only apply ray tracing if the game thinks your specs can handle it.

They also recommend dynamic resolution scaling, but with a caveat. Each upscaler has a different reaction to this setting, so you’ll want to pay attention to how your personal build manages it.

An interesting detail we found was that Digital Foundry used a Zen 2 CPU for testing. They found that it can run Dragon Age: The Veilguard just good enough, but can’t go up to 60 FPS.

What’s interesting about it, of course, is that Dragon Age: The Veilguard is Steam Deck Verified. The Deck has a customized version of the Zen 2 CPU. While Digital Foundry did not test the game on Valve’s portable hardware, we can assume that BioWare did the testing to give Deck owners an enjoyable experience.

All of this information makes us think that Dragon Age: The Veilguard could be a very good candidate for a Switch 2 port, at least if the rumors about other potential ports are to be believed. But that’s something we’ll need to find out in the future.

Here and now, PC gamers – and that includes Steam Deck owners – can rest easy that BioWare came through for them.

If you have the twenty minutes, you can watch Digital Foundry’s YouTube video on the topic below.