Dragon Age: The Veilguard PC Performance Analysis

Last week, EA released the new Dragon Age game, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, on PC. Powered by the Frostbite Engine, it’s time to benchmark it and examine its performance on the PC.

For our benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX580, RX Vega 64, RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX, NVIDIA’s GTX980Ti, RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080 and RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 566.03, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 24.10.1 drivers. Moreover, we’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.

BioWare has added a lot of graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Textures, Lighting, Level of Detail, Terrain and more. The game also supports Ray Tracing, DLSS 3, AMD FSR 3.0 and Intel XeSS. You can find comparisons and benchmarks for them in this article. In general, these are among the best graphics settings we’ve seen in a PC game. Not only do you get a small window that describes what each setting does, but you can see the visual changes you make in real-time.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard does not have a built-in benchmark. As such, we’ve decided to use the first area you encounter in the game. From what we could see, this is one of the most demanding areas. Thus, it should give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of the game runs.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is one of the few games that can take advantage of more than eight CPU cores. Although our average framerates were similar with and without SMT (Hyper-Threading for our Intel fans), our minimum framerates were significantly better when we had SMT. Look also at the CPU core usage with and without SMT.

From what I could see, you’ll need at least six CPU cores to get a smooth gaming experience. When I simulated a quad-core CPU, I was getting major framepacing issues, even when I enabled SMT. This is of course on Ultra Settings at 1080p. By lowering the settings, you might be able to smooth things on less powerful CPUs.

At 1080p/Ultra Settings/No Ray Tracing, the game can run smoothly on a wide range of GPUs. Even our NVIDIA RTX 2080Ti was able to push framerates higher than 70FPS at all times.

At 1440p/Ultra Settings/No RT, you’ll need a GPU equivalent to the NVIDIA RTX 3080. The NVIDIA RTX 2080Ti was also able to provide a smooth gaming experience, provided you use a G-Sync monitor.

Finally, at Native 4K/Ultra Settings/No RT, the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX and the NVIDIA RTX 4090 can push framerates higher than 60FPS at all times. You can also get a noticeable performance boost by lowering the settings (though, for some reason, High and Ultra performed similarly on our PC system).

Graphics-wise, Dragon Age: The Veilguard looks absolutely amazing. All of the characters are highly detailed and their hair is among the best I’ve seen in a video-game. The in-game characters look incredible and nowhere close to as “cartoon-ish” as with what I’ve seen in all the YT videos. I mean, look at the characters in the following screenshots. You may not like the art style, but in terms of graphics, they look awesome. The environments also look amazing, and BioWare has used a lot of high-quality textures. Players can also destroy a few objects, which is a nice touch. This is one of the best-looking games on PC, hands down.

It’s also worth noting that Dragon Age: The Veilguard does not suffer from any stuttering issues. Mouse movement is also great, and I did not experience any crashes during my extensive tests.

All in all, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is one of the most optimized PC games of 2024. The game runs smoothly on older PC systems. At the same time, it can also take advantage of more powerful PCs with the inclusion of Ray Tracing. And, even without RT, this is one of the best-looking PC games of 2024. Not only that but it does not suffer from any stutters or stability issues. Everything feels top-notch. This is a showcase for the Frostbite Engine, so kudos to the devs for offering such a polished product.

Enjoy!

John Papadopoulos

John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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