The technical mess that is Dragon's Dogma 2 | Dragon's Dogma 2: The best settings for your PC | Dragon's Dogma 2 performance analysis: It'll take everything your PC has and still want more
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Dragon's Dogma 2 is many things—thrilling, accidentally hilarious, and very charming—but as a PC gamer it's also a royal pain in the posterior. Particularly for poor Nick, who I tasked with spending the past few weeks throwing different pieces of hardware at the game to see what sticks, what helps performance, and what really, really doesn't. And, boy, we've got to tell you, you're going to need to make sure you've got a decent CPU to be able to get anything meaningful in terms of performance out of Dragon's Dogma 2.
For one thing, the published system requirements are a bit of a joke. If you're sporting the minimum specs in your gaming PC then you're probably looking at around 10 fps. In fact, if you can even get it working on the Steam Deck that's the absolute best you can expect.
But Fraser has become more than a little obsessed with the game, as you can see from our Dragon's Dogma 2 review, so it's worth persisting to try and get the best performance you can because the end results will be worth it.
If you were a fan of Capcom's original Dragon's Dogma, released on PC in 2016, then you will almost certainly be knee deep in pawns, monsters, and magic right now in its sequel. If you are, then you'll also have noticed that the game's performance isn't great, even if you have a powerful gaming PC. But all is not lost, as with this guide, you'll hopefully be able to tweak some settings and enjoy being the Arisen as Capcom intended.
That will depend on what CPU and graphics card you have, though, and whether you want the best performance in the open areas of the game, or just the main city. For example, if you have a Zen 3-based Ryzen 5 system with a Radeon RX 6600 or GeForce RTX 3060, the performance will be low no matter what setting you choose.
But if your CPU is better than that, preferably one of the latest generations with more than six cores, and paired with a decent mid-range GPU or higher, then there are a few settings well worth tweaking.
Dragon's Dogma 2 is the long-awaited sequel to Capcom's 2012 original release, that eventually appeared on the PC in 2016. Both games are classic open-world RPGs: Quests and monsters abound, strewn across a sprawling landscape, all begging to be explored and conquered.
The game uses Capcom's Reach for the Moon (RE) Engine, used to great success in the Resident Evil 4 remake, Resident Evil Village, Monster Hunter Rise, and many others. Although the first two are very linear, almost corridor-like in terms of world structure, MH Rise uses a large, seamless map, just as in Dragon's Dogma 2.
That means there are no loading screens, other than the primary one to jump into the game, and all of the assets (models, textures, shaders) are streamed across from your SSD into the graphics card's VRAM when needed. Such games are generally the most demanding of gaming PCs and that's no different here. So, without further ado, let's find out just how tough it is.
Unless you've been purposely ignoring all of the news surrounding Dragon's Dogma 2, you can't have missed the fact that the game's performance is somewhat poor. Although it's almost entirely CPU-limited in the main city, the open world is still pretty demanding on graphics cards and it's begging for a spot of upscaling and frame generation to give it all a handy boost. The former is already in the game but where's the latter, especially since the DLSS 3 file for frame gen is in the installation folder.
Dragon's Dogma 2 is a stellar RPG, but as you may have noticed in our performance analysis it's not exactly the smoothest one. It's incredibly demanding on CPUs, resulting in performance issues that you won't be able to escape regardless of how beefy your rig is. Capcom is aware of this, it says, but it seems unlikely they'll be resolved by launch.
All graphics cards get new drivers on a pretty regular basis these days, and that's especially true of Intel and its Arc series. The chip giant has just released a new set, with performance improvements for a variety of games, one of which being Dragon's Dogma 2. So I tested them out and you'll probably able to guess what happened...
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