Dragon Age II Q&A

PCGamesHardware.de is offering up a quick three-question Q&A with BioWare's Mike Laidlaw and Andrew Papathanasis about the PC-specific bells and whistles that they've implemented into Dragon Age II. From the difficult-to-read Google translation:
PCGH: In the official hardware requirements is a DirectX 11 graphics card, the speech - or her recommends the Radeon HD 5850 respectively Geforce GTX 460 better. Is this an indication that the PC version of Dragon Age 2 supports DirectX 11 and, if so, how far?

Bioware: We have experimented a lot with tessellation, and decided that our game and the style most of this part of DirectX 11 benefited. Our terrain tessellation uses the silhouettes and details to embellish the mesh floor, whereas this technique is used in urban quality of the surfaces of walls and floors in order to improve.

We also use shaders to compute the appearance of the Bloom effect on DirectX 11 hardware to improve. On the one hand, rises the optical quality, on the other hand, it costs (in comparison to DirectX 9), virtually no power. There are also other features such as ambient occlusion (SSAO), which makes the scene more realistic effect, the shading, large cloud shadows on the environment, a diffuse depth of field effect [Anm. d. R.: similar to Advanced Depth of Field in Metro 2033], so-called "contact hardening shadows" [Note d. R.: special soft shadows in Stalker with DX11 Call of Pripyat] and soft particles.Some of these effects do not even need a DirectX 11 graphics card, but work with DirectX 10 accelerators pixels together well.

Our DX11 highlight, however, is another render pass for dynamic lighting, which additional light sources and shadows of the scene adds. So you can focus on each level beautiful lighting make for a particular spell effects are more impressive than under DirectX 9 (for example, when a fireball exploded in a dark cave).