Dragon Age: The Veilguardhas elicited some mixed reactions from players, but one thing that almost everyone can agree on is its impressive visual fidelity.Opinions about BioWare’s pivot in art style aside,Veilguardis a fairly stunning artistic product, especially on PC, where it makes the most of modern hardware available to offer strong visuals and performance.
Among the suite of tools thatDragon Age: The Veilguardleverages on PC are various upscaling software. The game is compatible with AMD FSR, Intel XeSS, and, of course, NVIDIA DLSS 3, which seems to have the greatest impact on visuals and performance. This is particularly evident through 3rd-generation DLSS features like Frame Generation, which greatly smooths out the game via interpolation. I had the chance to testDragon Age: The Veilguardwith an NVIDIA RTX 4060, gaining some insight into how the game looks and plays on a lower-end 40-series GPU.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard Runs Great On 40-Series GPUs—Most of the Time
As already mentioned,Dragon Age: The Veilguardis a remarkably good-looking game: textures are rich and detailed, draw distance is vast and expansive, and ray-tracing effects help lighting reflect brilliantly and convincingly off metal, glass, water, et cetera. Naturally, Ultra settings across the board will net the greatest amount of detail and VFX, but the game still looks surprisingly good on lower settings.
DLSS 3 is what really helpsVeilguardshine, though. Enabling DLSS and Frame Generation can result in a massive increase in FPS—up to 30 frames in certain areas—without a noticeable sacrifice in visual fidelity: on Balanced, with all settings turned up to Ultra, I was able to settle into a fairly comfortable 75FPS for most of my time with the game. DLSS 3 is a major improvement over its predecessor, and that really comes through inVeilguard: there is little to no artifacting with DLSS enabled, nor is there the screen door effect that can sometimes be observed in earlier generations of the software. That said, Ultra Performance can make the game look quite washed-out and unappealing, and the additional frames it offers won’t be worth the loss of visual quality for most players.
WhileVeilguardalmost always managed to run above 60 FPS, I experienced a good amount of stuttering in certain areas, especially with ray-tracing turned on. This issue was exacerbated by the fact that, for whatever reason, I could not seem to set a maximum framerate within the application: I attempted to cap my FPS at 60 inVeilguard’s settings, but the game would continue to target 75 FPS, resulting in some frustrating inconsistency that undermined an otherwise solid experience.
Aside from an RTX 4060, my setup includes an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X and 32GB of RAM. I alsotestedVeilguardwith AMD FSR, which resulted in fewer frames and worse overall visual quality than with DLSS.
I also encountered a disappointing amount of screen-tearing, which seemed to come in phases and at random. As a result, we recommend turning on Vsync in the Nvidia Control panel, rather than using app settings (which is the default)
Overall,Dragon Age: The Veilguardis a solid showcase of NVIDIA’s DLSS 3 software. Issues that are ostensibly on the side of the application, like the problems with FPS capping and screen-tearing, may be patched to allow for better performance down the road. But for now, anyone with a lower-end 40-series GPU looking to pick upDragon Age: The Veilguardhas some pretty sights to look forward to—as long as they’re willing to put up with some warts here and there.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard
WHERE TO PLAY
Enter the world of Thedas, a vibrant land of rugged wilderness, treacherous labyrinths, and glittering cities – steeped in conflict and secret magics. Now, a pair of corrupt ancient gods have broken free from centuries of darkness and are hellbent on destroying the world.Thedas needs someone they can count on. Rise as Rook, Dragon Age’s newest hero. Be who you want to be and play how you want to play as you fight to stop the gods from blighting the world. But you can’t do this alone – the odds are stacked against you. Lead a team of seven companions, each with their own rich story to discover and shape, and together you will become The Veilguard.
