Introduction:
Now, with the engine known from the online-shooter Battlefield 4, the studio shows that it has answered to fan criticism. Technically Dragon Age: Inquisition has succeeded brilliantly and is sure to be the best looking role playing game thus far.
It only takes seconds to show us clearly, that Bioware wants to distance itself as far as possible from the heavily criticised second part of the franchise. While the constantly repeating levels in Dragon Age 2 were still small and mostly kept in boring red-brown, the sheer complexity of the outside scenes nearly overwhelm us and now every upcoming role playing game must measure itself with the unbelievable view distance and graphical finesse. Yes, even The Witcher 3. Bioware strikingly demonstrates what it can accomplish with new (console-) hardware, modern technology and most of all enough time on their hands. Wow!
[...] (battlefield 4)
Features:
For the Bioware role playing game the lightning and shading model was changed to Physically Based Rendering, additionally the developers consistently use all modern engine features. Including high resolution, albeit subtle textures, Soft Cascading Shadows, Volumetric Lighting, Parallax-Mapping, Tessellation, Imaged Based Lighting as well as Sub Surface Scattering and so forth. And the AMD-API Mantle, that especially helps older processors and those with rather below average performance-per-watt along. In some cases this is sorely needed, because the gigantic levels including scarcely perceptible level of detail and a lot of small finesses cause rather high hardware hunger that can't be satisfied with just a fast GPU.
[...] (character creation and depth of field)
Almost every texture is high resolution, and not only just two meters around the character, but rather until the horizon. Even the mountains in the backdrop are covered by exceptionally high resolution textures. Many of the surfaces are covered by parallax-maps, often in combination with tessellation. The plastic depth is by and large excellent. Okay, with a bit of effort you can find a few blurry textures or low-poly level objects, but those are really high-level nitpicks.
Issues:
One annoyance is the 30 fps lock during cutscenes that always feel quite suttery while the game runs with a 200 fps lock (that can be disabled). Additionally the lip movements aren't synced to the german localisation and some of the animations feel a bit wooden, even though the characters react very nicely to outer circumstances like the slant of the ground, and pronounced specular flickering.Sadly this isn't easily solvable. The many and maybe a little exaggerated glossy and reflecting surfaces are thanks to Physically Based Shading very beautiful in most cases, but have a severe downside: Typical anti aliasing methods like MSAA or FXAA don't or only insufficiently reduce shader aliasing. Bokeh-Depth of field in cut scenes amplify the issue. Some of few methods that work are only partly functional. In Dragon Age: Inquisition the resolution can only be upscaled from a lower to the native resolution. Internal resolutions above 100% don't work, not even per console command. That is irritating, but regarding the system requirements not dramatic, because that those are steep.
Requirements:
On the highest settings Dragon Age: Inquisition is quite the hardware devourer. While the graphics card requirements are understandable for every gamer, it is first and foremost the CPU that is challenged. For hardware-affine gamers this might be reasonable, after all the wide view, level of detail and number of NPCs is quite impressive. But after many years of stagnation in this area the demand of the role playing game on the processor will surprise one or two. Gamers with a moderate Intel Quadcore with 3 GHz need to bring little sorrow, older or weaker processors with outdated performance-per-cycle circumstances will perhaps get into a pretty pickle. For instance, the Intel Core i7-920 of the author doesn't even get 30 fps at max details in Full-HD despite a overclock to 3.8 GHz. And even our test PC, a Intel Core i7-4790 @ 4.5 Ghz has using DX11 one thread near maximum load. Admittedly it is possible to distribute the load a bit, if we reduce the resolution and anti-aliasing - the Haswell manages 120 fps in 720p - but each and every additional Megahertz expresses itself in additional fps even in 1080p with 4xMSAA.
Enters AMDs low-level API Mantle. Especially impressive are the performance improvements of Mantle for old or weak CPUs like the author uses. In combination with a R9 290X can the aged Bloomfield gain 45% performance compared to DX11. That is the difference between a intolerable Stutterfest and an adequately fluid game experience. Even with a Core i7-4790K @ 4.5 Ghz the low-level API can gain 10% compared to the overhead-plagued microsoft API. Thus the R9 290x can clearly pull ahead of the much stronger overclocked GTX 980.
