Dragon Age: Inquisition PC/PS4 Graphics Comparison
Dragon Age: Inquisition is finally available worldwide on PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One and, following the success of our graphics comparisons for Lords of the Fallen and Assassin’s Creed Unity, we have once again prepared a series of screenshots grabbed from the PC and PS4 versions in the same instances to showcase potential differences.
This time though, the results are quite different. Let’s begin with some screenshots from one of the first cutscenes.
Quite honestly, I wouldn’t be able to tell one from another if it wasn’t for the button prompts (Dragon Age: Inquisition on PC doesn’t recognize the DualShock 4 as Assassin’s Creed Unity and Far Cry 4 do, so you’re forced to use DS4Windows and get Xbox prompts). Such as in the following case:
I tried very hard to find something different, but I simply couldn’t. That’s not quite the case with actual gameplay, though.
The main difference which we found in our graphics comparison is already evident here, although it will be more noticeable later: take a look at Cassandra’s shadow, it’s much more crisp and defined on PC. That’s not the only difference in this case though, as our protagonist’s hair looks much better and more natural on PC, while it has a plastic look on PS4. Her left shoulder armor also appears to have more detail on PC.
Everything else, though, is pretty much the same.
Here, the shadow difference is perhaps more pronounced in favor of PC, but everything else looks exactly the same.
In this case, I noticed something different. Bricks on the road appear on PlayStation 4 while walking, which is a bit distracting; obviously this is much more noticeable in motion, but even in these stills you can see that on PC all the bricks are rendered along the road, while on PS4 the farthest part of the road doesn’t have them yet. The rest, though, is identical.
Once again, the main differences are more detailed shadows on the ice stalactites on the left. The tree on the rock also looks slightly better on PC, but that’s it.
The final screenshot of our Dragon Age: Inquisition graphics comparison once again shows how close the two versions really are. At first glance they’re identical; the only difference is the tree shadow on the rock to the left, far crisper on PC.
The screenshots of the PC version were taken on Ultra settings (including Fade touched textures) with PostProcessing AA on Medium and MSAA 2x. Why is Dragon Age Inquisition much different than Lords of the Fallen and Asassin’s Creed Unity, which demonstrated huge differences in favor of PC? We can only speculate, however there are a couple of hard facts.
- The Frostbite Engine is optimized for AMD hardware (AMD users on PC can even run the game using Mantle instead of DX11 for a performance boost), and both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are built on AMD hardware. On the other hand, both Lords of the Fallen and Assassin’s Creed Unity made heavy use of NVIDIA‘s GameWorks effects such as TXAA, HBAO+ and more, while Frostbite has none of those, since DICE (the original developer of Frostbite, though DA: I has been made by Bioware) has sided with AMD instead.
- Both Lords of the Fallen and Assassin’s Creed Unity are only available for next generation hardware (PC, PS4, XB1), while Dragon Age: Inquisition is also available for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
Still, Dragon Age: Inquisition remains a beautiful game with some really striking environments later in the game, and most importantly it’s a great RPG that genre fans really shouldn’t miss. Look forward to our review soon.