Dragon’s Dogma 2 has landed, with all the highs and lows you might expect from Hideaki Itsuno’s latest action-RPG. However, for all that the game has plenty of positives as an overall experience, Dragon’s Dogma 2 PC performance has been a fairly terrible.
The problem with Dragon’s Dogma 2 is two fold. For a start, the game has generally been dogged by stability issues, with regular crashes dumping you out the game. Perhaps even more annoyingly, it has consistently terrible frame rate stability issues – something that particularly plague our experience when writing our Dragon’s Dogma 2 review, with large amounts of stutter and frame rate dropping to very low levels, even on very high-end hardware.
So, what’s going on? Well, there seem to be two factors at play. The first is that the game uses a lot of CPU processing to model each character in the game. This in turn means open areas with few characters run fine but in densely populated areas, such as major cities, the CPU gets overloaded, causing a massive bottleneck to the overall system.
This is the sort of experience we had and that has been cited by IGN, which received an official response from Capcom stating that:
“In Dragon’s Dogma 2, a large amount of CPU usage is allocated to each character and dynamically calculates the impact of their physical presence in various environments. In certain situations where numerous characters appear simultaneously, the CPU usage can be very high and may affect the frame rate,” a Capcom representative told IGN. “We are aware that in such situations, settings that reduce GPU load may currently have a limited effect; however, we are looking into ways to improve performance in the future.”
This would seem to suggest that users with a particularly powerful CPU would not have these frame rate drop issues. However, our own testing used a variety of CPUs on different systems, including 8 core/16 thread chips and we still had theses issues. Likewise, computerbase.de tests were performed using an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D and still had these issues.
As such, the other major reason why the game may still be struggling so much – other than it simply not being a well optimized PC port yet – is that there are currently no official Game Ready drivers from Nvidia, with AMD and Intel only now releasing their respective drivers. While these drivers tend to only offer minor performance improvements, it’s possible there’s some crucial optimization that could be done on the driver side that could unclog Dragon’s Dogma 2 performance issues and improve stability.
The upshot, then, is that unless you’re lucky and your PC has just the right combination of hardware that you don’t experience these performance issues, you’ll have to wait until there’s a patch released for the game or some Game Ready drivers are released for the game to get a smoother more stable experience. In the mean time, you can check out our Dragon’s Dogma 2 best settings guide to find out how to get the most from the game in its current state.