Dragon Age Inquisition is Bioware’s most ambitious game till date. The game has been released across five platforms and that in itself is some heavy lifting by Bioware. We played a few hours of the game on both the PS4 and Xbox One and we are pleased to report that except a few minor issues on the latter, the performance on both the versions is pretty much identical.
It’s already a well known fact that the game runs at 1080p on the PlayStation 4 and 900p on the Xbox One. This immediately gives rise to a superior image quality on the PlayStation 4. Having said that only keen eyes will notice the difference. During our play through, the PlayStation 4 version was very smooth with no lag in frame rate during the initial battles. The Xbox One version, although keeps it steady on most occasions does lag a bit when the action gets heavy. It’s not a show stopper and most users won’t even notice it.
On the technology front, the character models and the environments are the biggest gain on the PS4 and Xbox One. The Frostbite delivers a decent upgrade to the visuals of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions. The anti-aliasing and global illumination seems to be similar across the board and the shadow maps have been beautifully rendered. We also found out that there is the odd jitter when custcenes kick in, due to which the frame rate suffers on both the versions. An explanation for this was given by Bioware’s Allan Schumacher on the official forum and it won’t be patched in the immediate future:
“You’re not controlling the characters (especially not in spinning around in circles) in conversations either. At least, the “full conversations’ that are cinematic. The conversations that you still have player control over won’t do this. At least they shouldn’t, because the cinematic system isn’t taking control. ”
“This is done mostly because the animation system can behave oddly for complex animations if something happens that causes them to be updated asynchronously. So we synched the two during cinematics to work around this issue. Fixing the problem would be a lot of work, and likely won’t be patched (definitely not day one) unless other, more serious issues end up manifesting as a result of this system.”
Our initial tests suggest that PS4 version is in the lead but there is a lot of to explore in Dragon Age Inquisition and we will make sure to keep you updated on our final verdict. We will also like to add that our final verdicts on Call of Duty Advanced Warfare, Far Cry 4, Assassin’s Creed Unity and Grand Theft Auto 5 will be published soon. We understand that they have been delayed but we have been bombarded with a lot of game releases in the past few days.
In the mean time check out some comparison shots between the PS4 and Xbox One versions. On the left we have Xbox One version and on the right we have the PS4 version. Below the screenshot you will be find a video comparison in slow motion between the two.
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