Dragon Age: The Veilguard will feature selective ray tracing, a feature that we’ve not seen openly listed on in-game settings before. It could be huge for gamers with lower-end GPUs looking to still enjoy some ray tracing enhancements without bogging down performance throughout the game.
The Dragon Age: The Veilguard system requirements are already friendly to older gaming PCs, but this new ray tracing feature will bring improved lighting to low-end ray tracing-capable cards, such as Nvidia RTX and AMD RX cards, without becoming too resource-hungry.
We’ve already talked about how over 200,000 hours of testing have been done on Dragon Age: The Veilguard on PC in order to make sure it’s ready for its release date. However, it was a simple asterisk on the ray tracing settings in the latest blog post that caught my eye.
In the detailed PC settings list that was sent though, we can see that there are three ray tracing settings in Dragon Age: The Veilguard: ray traced reflections, ray traced ambient occlusion, and ultra ray tracing.
An asterisk next to these settings is clarified at the end of the text, stating that “ray tracing can be turned On or turned to Selective. Selective Mode enables ray tracing features in specific areas that can best take advantage of the feature”.
This seems to suggest that there are either pre-determined areas of the game that will see ray tracing enabled when the selective setting is turned on or that the game will be able to dynamically monitor its frame rate and turn ray tracing features on or off in accordance with how the game is coping.
For the former scenario, my initial assumption is that selective ray tracing is most likely to come into play only when navigating the open world, with graphical fidelity reduced during combat, where frame rate matters most. From the above RTX trailer, it’s clear that the impact of ray tracing could be huge, especially in dark, dank dungeons where lighting will be heavily relied upon to set the tone. However given how the magic combat is also heavily reliant on vibrant lighting, it would be great to see this included in the selective setting too.
Regardless of exactly how is implemented, in theory it’s all rather brilliant, and I’m keen to see how it works in the final version of the game. Moreover, it’s something I’d love to see used in other future games too.
I can’t wait to put this feature to the test. Along with the inclusion of frame generation technology with support for DLSS 3, I’m expecting the game to run and look fantastic. Better still, the game will also be Steam Deck Verified and won’t require the EA App launcher to run.