Conclusion

After 10 years, Dragon Age: Veilguard marks an exciting continuation of the beloved RPG universe, developed by BioWare. Set in the fictional world of Thedas, it brings you back to the franchise while introducing fresh gameplay mechanics that promise to enhance the experience. The combat is designed to be fast-paced and engaging, with a focus on skillful maneuvering and timing rather than traditional button mashing. You still have the option to pause everything to activate spells and skills, also on your companions, of which you have only two at a time now. The companions have interesting background stories, some of them you already know from previous titles of the series. While the beginning of the game that familiarizes you with gameplay and mechanics is a bit boring, things pick up later, and I'd say that the game is definitely worth checking out for lovers of the RPG genre. On the other hand, sometimes I felt reminded of less successful games that focus too much on action and too little on RPG. So far, Veilguard isn't even close to Baldur's Gate, but things may change as I make my way through the campaign.

Graphics
Dragon Age: Veilguard uses the EA in-house Frostbite engine, which is an unexpected sight, considering that most of the gaming market is moving to Unreal Engine. The legendary Battlefield series is powered by Frostbite, too, but besides that, the engine hasn't seen widespread use, except for in-house EA titles. As expected, the version of Frostbite in Dragon Age has been updated with several refinements to bring it up to speed for 2024. Our screenshots show that a lot of effort has gone into creating richly detailed maps with varied biomes. I also like how well the artists crafted the environments to look interesting. Many world objects have excellent levels of geometric detail. The characters on the other hand look just about average—recent Unreal Engine games do much better here, also when it comes to facial animations and expression. The quality of textures is "good" across the board, just good, not fantastic. Here, too, the newest Unreal Engine titles look considerably better. I like that there aren't so many flat floors, which for me are just a sign of designer laziness, or limited budgets. The cutscenes look good, and finally, there is an option to turn off the black bars, at the risk of small rendering issues—I didn't notice anything on 16:10. Overall, Dragon Age Veilguard looks good, very good in some areas, but it definitely cannot set new standards for graphics in 2024. I'm not a fan of the art style, with cartoon-like characters and unrealistic lighting, and there's an always-on bloom effect that's extremely distracting, to me at least. Good thing that you can disable it, by editing the config file manually, more info on the settings page.

Shader Stutter and Accessibility
Frostbite has been fighting shader stutters for years, basically since they added support for DirectX 12. With Dragon Age: Veilguard there are a few minutes of shader compilation at first startup or after a driver update, which fixes stutter completely—good! During gameplay, I noticed some very rare traversal stutter, maybe once every hour, barely noticeable, almost not worth mentioning. Level loading is pretty fast, too, no complaints here either. As mentioned before, there's an annoying bloom shader effect that can't be disabled in settings, you can disable motion blur, vignette and depth of field though. The game provides a variety of difficulty settings and also includes options for players with color blindness.

I really, really want to praise EA for not forcing the EA launcher on us, and there's also no Denuvo DRM. If you pirated the game and like it, support this new approach. In the past you had to launch EA games through a separate launcher, even when purchased on Steam. I also like that there's no anti-cheat, which has appeared in some recent single-player games—please let us cheat if we want to.

Effects & Upscalers
Veilguard has support for NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS, and there is also support for Frame Generation, but only NVIDIA DLSS. DLAA is supported, too, but in a slightly awkward way, you have to pick it as Anti-Aliasing option, not in DLSS settings. In addition to that there is a "Render Scale" slider, which lets you adjust the resolution scaling, and you can use dynamic resolution scaling, too, to hit a certain target FPS.

Hardware Requirements
Hardware requirements are pretty reasonable, maybe slightly on the high side. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p, Ultra setting, without ray tracing, you need a RTX 3070, RX 6800, RX 7700 XT or RTX 4060 Ti. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you need a RTX 3080, RTX 4070, RX 7900 GRE, RX 6900 XT or faster. 4K60? That won't be easy. Even without RT, the only card that can hit 60 FPS is the RTX 4090. The RX 7900 XTX is close behind though, with 59.3 FPS. Once we enabled ray tracing, hardware requirements went up, as expected, more so for AMD than for NVIDIA. Just to clarify, we used the "full" ray tracing setting for this testing, not "selective" or "Ultra RT." As always we opted for our own custom test scene, which is located in a larger outdoor area. Dragon Age is fairly CPU limited, even with a high-end CPU, but that depends on the testing location as well, so we made sure to pick a good spot.

Settings Performance Scaling
Check out our comparison screenshots. Can you spot any differences between lowest and highest + RT? The changes are almost imperceptible, likely minimal. The performance scaling isn't big either. While you can gain around +50% FPS by going from Ultra + RT to Low, the delta between Ultra without RT and low is just +20% or so. This means that BioWare really didn't spend much time on coming up with good settings scaling, which is a lost opportunity. If you give me a choice of settings, shouldn't they offer a meaningful tradeoff between image quality and FPS?

VRAM
Our VRAM testing shows that the newest Dragon Age is very well-behaved in terms of VRAM usage. Even at 4K with RT you're barely hitting 12 GB; lowest settings runs at around 6 GB, so virtually all cards can handle the game without problems.

Overall, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a solid PC release that comes with a good range of tweakable options and that has no shader stutter issues. The gameplay is solid, the story, too, time will tell whether it turns out to be a huge hit or not. At the moment it's sitting at 11k Steam reviews, "Mostly Positive."