Earlier this week at Gamescom 2024, NVIDIA announced that Dragon Age: The Veilguard would support ray tracing effects on PC alongside DLSS 3 (Super Resolution and Frame Generation).
Yesterday, the studio dived more deeply into the realm of PC features and optimization, confirming other upscalers (AMD FSR 2.2, Intel XeSS), support for Ultrawide displays, uncapped frame rate, and a Field of View slider despite the third-person view. They also briefly touched upon ray tracing, mentioning options like ray traced reflections, ray traced ambient occlusion, and Ultra ray tracing.
Today, I had the opportunity to check out Dragon Age: The Veilguard at Gamescom. While the game itself is not available for preview in Cologne, the developers brought it to the NVIDIA booth in the business area to show off the ray tracing effects. In a hands-off demonstration, I watched a 10-minute section from the beginning of the game being played live on a laptop.
My first question was about the Ultra RT setting. I hoped it might add extra ray traced effects, such as global illumination, but that's not the case; instead, enabling Ultra RT simply maxes out the fidelity of the ray traced reflections and ambient occlusion.
With that out of the way, I quickly realized that even just these two effects made quite the difference, especially in certain scenes such as the one in the screenshot above, greatly improving the game's visuals.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard also ran smoothly and seemingly without a hitch, even with ray tracing enabled, although the laptop was a very powerful one powered by RTX 4090 mobile GPU (which is roughly equivalent to an RTX 4080 desktop GPU). Still, that's not very surprising: the official system requirements are fairly low. Perhaps that's because the game focuses on smaller and more linear environments compared to the open world-like zone of Dragon Age: Inquisition.
This may also play a part in something I discovered from the developers: Dragon Age: The Veilguard will offer ray tracing on consoles, too, specifically on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X (not S). They couldn't provide more details, sadly.
To accommodate the consoles' far inferior ray tracing capabilities, BioWare could perhaps focus just on reflections, which are the most obvious improvement of the two (although I really like the more grounded look provided by ray traced ambient occlusion). That's just speculation, though; we'll have to wait for the official info to know exactly what kind of ray tracing console users can expect. It shouldn't be too long, with the game due to launch in slightly more than two months.
