The Technology of Dragon Age II, Part Two

The second installment to BioWare’s examination of the technology powering Dragon Age II goes into DirectX 11 territory by revealing the new dynamic lighting, tessellation, ambient occlusion, and diffusion depth of field effects that those of us with modern PC GPUs are going to be enjoying.

The game has hundreds of spell effects, the rendering of which is greatly improved on high end PC video cards. On the high detail setting (requires DX10 or better hardware), the game will smooth particle edges so they blend better with the environment (without hard edges at the contact point).

One of the major features of the DirectX 11 version is that the dynamic lighting for spell effects has been completely redone. While our base rendering technology supports 2-3 dynamic lights per visual effect, the DirectX 11 renderer supports hundreds of dynamic lights. Our artists have used that feature to great extent by attaching numerous small lights to spell effects that are expected to emit light (for example, fire and lighting effects). This is a great feature that significantly improves the visual impact of some of the most important spells in the game.

In addition, certain lighting effects will also add additional shadows to the scene. For example, when casting a fireball to a group of enemies, players will see shadows from all enemies. This looks great especially on indoor scenes.