Comparison between normal & high-resolution textures of Dragon Age 2

By on March 8, 2011

The release of a high-resolution texture pack for the PC version of Dragon Age 2 is certainly a nice move from BioWare, that most PC gamers will acknowledge. But does it really make any difference? We compared the game’s normal textures with the revised, high-resolution ones from the early stages of the game. As it is pretty obvious, BioWare did a great job but the re-texturing applies only to the terrain. Before continuing, know this. You can apply this pack even if you don’t have a DX11 card. In case you didn’t know, if you own a DX10 you can run the game in DX10 mode via the DX11 renderer. By using the DX11 renderer, you can enable the high-resolution texture pack and enjoy the enhanced textures. DX9 owners on the other hand won’t be able to enable them, no matter what.

Characters retained the same textures even when we enabled the high-res pack, whereas most of the objects (like rocks or walls) are affected by it. We can’t help but wonder why BioWare decided to use such low-res textures in normal mode. Quite frankly, some of them take us back to the blurry days of Nintendo 64. Moreover, even these high-res textures are not as good as we’d hope to. Don’t get us wrong, the look great overall and are way better than the ones in vanilla Dragon Age: Origins. But still, they can’t match those of The Witcher 2. 

You can view the comparison shots bellow. On the left are the vanilla shots and on the right the ones with the high-resolution texture pack enabled. Enjoy!

About David Scarpitta

I am a critical guy, and love to review and give my professional opinion on just about anything. Though have a love for tech/gaming and music alongside the cinema. You can catch me consulting and developing the net any day of the week.
  • Joe

    Actually the texture pack is not just to the terrain. Look at the sword in the first images. Biiiiiiiig difference.

  • john2

    Characters remain the same, look closely to their textures. However, as you said, the main sword is among the objects that are tweaked ;)