Dragon’s Dogma 2 Benchmarked: The Real Deal About PC Performance
The title finally came to Windows PCs almost four years later in 2016. This version included all of the updates and expansions that the console versions received, as well as being a quality port with excellent performance and stability. Many Steam gamers snatched it up and put hundreds of hours into it, making it a surprise success for Capcom. The success of the PC version was ultimately a major factor in the company's decision to greenlight a sequel.
Now, Dragon's Dogma 2 has arrived, and on Steam alone it's showing over 200,000 players today. That's a success by any metric, but it likely has sold many more copies on Xbox and PlayStation consoles too. There has been some controversy caused by individuals misrepresenting the story after seeing a smattering of one-time shortcut DLCs in the Steam store, but we'll talk about that later. Instead, let's talk about Dragon's Dogma 2's performance.
Much has been made of the game's performance problems. Alex Battaglia of Digital Foundry, posting on Reddit, says that there are major performance issues in the game's cities. Specifically, he notes that "they are always occurring there on machines of all types at all times in the city." We were surprised, as loading up the game, it was quite smooth on our test system with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and a GeForce RTX 4080.
Note that the ROG Ally is using an older Radeon driver.
Yep—the 1% low framerate on our fastest configuration is only 26 FPS. That's quite far from our average of 61 FPS on that setup, and you'll note that running the same system without DLSS upscaling provides almost no loss of performance in the city. That's because, rather than a GPU limitation, this is actually a major system performance bottleneck. We haven't done enough testing to confirm if it's CPU, memory, storage, or even network speed causing the spikes, but they are definitely there. Check out this frametime graph:
It is an absolute mess, and it's clearly visible while traversing the city. Things do level out somewhat if you stay in one area of the city; this benchmark is a 30 second test of us dashing across the city, causing new NPCs to load in consistently. However, it never becomes smooth, and you'll constantly notice these little hitches while moving around in the city area.
So the game's performance is a disaster, right? Well, no, actually. In fact, it's pretty good for the most part. You see, capital city Vernworth is ultimately a pretty small portion of the game. Dragon's Dogma 2 is an enormous adventure that takes place in a huge open world, and the capital city is really very small compared to the overall game world. Outside of Vernworth, the game runs rather smoothly—as long as your hardware is up to the task of running a current-generation AAA game, anyway.
Looking at this chart, it's important to understand that we have the game's graphics settings whacked to the maximum here, including ray-tracing (except for on the ROG Ally.) The title is gorgeous with these settings, and just like the first game, combat is a blast, with silky smooth performance. Keep in mind that Dragon's Dogma 2, despite supporting high frame rates and other PC-specific features like ultrawide resolutions, is actually designed to be played at 30 FPS; a 1% low of 39 FPS actually doesn't feel bad at all in this game.
Sure, this isn't the smoothest frametime graph we've ever seen, but it's very far from the worst. It's important to keep these discussions in context. Many people have looked at the admittedly very poor performance in the city of Vernworth and decreed that the game is a "bad port" or that it is more generally "unoptimized", when in reality it's just that one area of the game that seems to have significant performance issues. Other, smaller settlements don't have the performance issues that you see in the capital.
To be clear, Dragon's Dogma 2 is a very demanding game. You will need recent hardware to run it well; the system requirements given by CAPCOM are the bare minimum to play the game at around 30 FPS. If you want 60 FPS or more, you're going to need hardware no more than a generation old; Zen+ and Skylake CPUs need not apply, and you're still not going to get that kind of performance in the city. There does not exist a computer that can run this game smoothly in the cities at this moment and time, and the problem affects consoles, too, so it's not a porting problem.
For its part, CAPCOM is already aware of the issues with performance in Vernworth and is looking at fixes. We suspect that improvements to asset loading and multi-threading can probably smooth over the worst of the fixes. However, this kind of hitching was a major problem in the capital of Gran Soren in the first game, and it was due to the same reason, too: constantly loading in new pawns for the player to recruit. It may be that players just have to live with rough performance in Vernworth for now.
