Bioware has revealed that Dragon Age: The Veilguard will be enhanced for PlayStation 5 Pro. But you may not like to hear how.
Technical director Maciej Kurowski explained how these enhancements will work out in a blog post about the game’s specifications across all platforms. Here’s what Kurowski said:
“We are excited to see how Dragon Age: The Veilguard will lean into the power that PS5 Pro unlocks for players.
Whether you love deep progression, strategic combat, or diving into the lore of Dragon Age, you will immediately notice the improved experience with PS5 Pro.
The game’s Fidelity and Performance modes will both see improvements on the hardware, including improved resolution in 30FPS Fidelity and 60FPS Performance modes.
Additionally, there will be various improved visual settings across 30FPS Fidelity and 60FPS Performance mode.
The team at BioWare is proud of how immersed players will be when they enter the beautiful world of Thedas, with upgraded image quality thanks to Sony’s new AI-based upscaler, PSSR.
We’ve enabled Raytraced Ambient Occlusion (RTAO) in the 60FPS Performance mode, which previously was only available on the base PlayStation 5 with 30FPS Fidelity mode.”
Kurowski is as clear and straightforward as you would hope. Dragon Age: The Veilguard will not run at 4K 60 FPS on the PlayStation 5 Pro.
Instead, Bioware has enabled visual and graphical effects to improve performance on both Fidelity and Performance modes. They are particularly proud of applying ray traced ambient occlusion on 60 FPS Performance mode.
This lines up with some of the things Mark Cerny himself said the PlayStation 5 Pro would be used for. PlayStation 5 Pro users will get a better looking game than is on the PlayStation 5.
As a third party game, we won’t wager to speculate if the PlayStation 5 Pro version will be better than the Xbox Series X|S version. For that matter, it is absolutely possible that a cloud gaming version of this game, such as Game Pass cloud streaming, could provide superior performance than either platform.
Bioware doesn’t share that information here, and it is likely that we will have to wait for reviewers like Digital Foundry to discover that and share it with the rest of us.
And so we now know of one PlayStation 5 Pro Enhanced game that won’t be able to run at 4K 60 FPS. Maybe it is possible that you can set the game at 4K 60 FPS, or at an uncapped framerate, but Bioware did not commit to this because they couldn’t make it stable under those performance settings.
We don’t know if this will continue to be the case with other games, or if developers will just need more time to work it out. But if there are technical limits for newer games to hit those landmarks, or if Sony’s development tools are not good enough, there may be less 4K 60 FPS games on the PlayStation 5 Pro than gamers hoped for.
As always, we report this in recognition that gamers, as consumers, see the PlayStation 5 Pro as the possible fulfillment of the promise of 4K 60 FPS games. As we learn about the performance benchmarks and other achievements of games on the console, we hope it helps inform consumers to make responsible purchasing decisions.
