Dragon Age: The Veilguard's 'Ultra Ray Tracing' is so well optimized on PC it doesn't need DLSS

BioWare's Dragon Age: The Veilguard is out this weekend, and based on reviews (the game is currently sitting on an 84 rating on Metacritic), many critics are hailing it as a return to form for the studio that made a name for itself for creating engaging single-player RPGs. Outside of the actual content, the good news for PC gamers is that it's one of those rare releases that is well-optimized and pushes the visuals much further than what's possible on consoles.

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The gaming tech gurus at Digital Foundry have posted a new video praising the PC version's visuals, performance, and stability. In addition, NVIDIA's latest DLSS round-up for the week shows that the game runs incredibly well on GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs with full ray-tracing without DLSS - a rare feat for a modern AAA cinematic release.

At 1080p, everything from the GeForce RTX 4070 and up can run the game with Ultra Settings and Ultra Ray Tracing at 70+ FPS without DLSS. Bump this up to 1440p, and the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER hits an average of 61.4 FPS without any DLSS action. Bump things up one step further to 4K, and one GPU delivers 4K 60+ FPS Ultra Ray Tracing without DLSS.

Here's NVIDIA's performance breakdown, with DLSS numbers highlighted.

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The GeForce RTX 4090's native average frame rate is 65.7 FPS at 4K. Turn on DLSS 3 Super Resolution and Frame Generation, and this number climbs to an impressive 151.5 FPS. This is a remarkable feat because Dragon Age: The Veilguard's Ultra-quality setting is demanding, so it's a testament to the stellar job BioWare has done regarding the game's optimization.

Naturally, this is not to say that you shouldn't play the game with DLSS enabled - as you're looking at free performance that doesn't adversely impact the game's presentation. At 4K, DLSS 3 (including Frame Generation) increases the game's performance by an average of 2.5X. At 1440p and 1080p, the performance is increased by an average of 1.9X.