I had high hopes for Dragons Dogma 2.Capcom has hit a few stumbles on PC over its last several releases, but the resilient RE Engine thats behind its slate of titles has always shined through. The highly scalable engine is what allowsStreet Fighter 6andResident Evil 4to run on everything from an RTX 4090 down to a Steam Deck, and its what squeezes playable frame rates out of Monster Hunter Riseon hardware as weak as the Nintendo Switch.

Contents Even the best settings for Dragons Dogma 2 struggleA crash courseDont believe the Dragons Dogma 2 system requirementsHorrific town performance in Dragons Dogma 2Tricky upscaling optionsDragons Dogma 2 on PC: the verdictShow 1 more item The RE Engine looks terrible inDragons Dogma 2,however. I can verify that the game does indeed slam your CPU hard, bringing even the most powerful PC hardware to its knees with no recourse in the graphics options. Over the past several years, the RE Engine has cemented itself as one of the most stable, scalable game engines around, but Dragons Dogma 2challenges that narrative in a big way.

　　Even the best settings for Dragons Dogma 2 struggle

Dragons Dogma 2has a fairly long list of graphics settings that should look familiar to anyone whos played a game running on the RE Engine before. After toying around with the options, here are the best settings I found forDragons Dogma 2:

Rendering Mode:Progressive Image Quality:Default Ray Tracing:Off Ambient Occlusion:SSAO Anti-aliasing: TAA Screen Space Reflections:Off Mesh Quality:Mid Texture Filtering:High (ANISO x4) Grass/Tree Quality:Mid Resource-Intense Effects Quality:High Shadow Quality:High Shadow Cache:On Contact Shadows:On Motion Blur:Off Bloom:On Depth of Field:Off Lens Flare:On Lends Distortion:On Subsurface Scattering:Off Motion Quality:High

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming ReSpec Subscribe Check your inbox! Privacy Policy This is the starting point Id recommend for most people, but there are a few concessions. First is ray tracing. Dragons Dogma 2supports ray-traced global illumination, which does wonders for image quality. If you can run with ray tracing on at a playable frame rate for your hardware, you should. Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) brings a bit more depth to the world, and is a fair trade-off if youre struggling to hit playable performance with ray tracing on.

Dragon's Dogma 2 settings comparison I also want to draw attention to the anti-aliasing. Dragons Dogma 2 supports Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) and Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA), but you can also turn anti-aliasing off. You shouldnt. You can see why in the video above comparing the lowest, highest, and recommended graphics options. There is horrible flickering on the shadows with anti-aliasing turned off.

　　A crash course

Outside of performance in towns more on that later the biggest issue plaguing Dragons Dogma 2on PC is crashing. There are multiple solutions to crashing, but youll probably need to try a few before finding a solution that sticks. For starters, make sure you have the latest graphics driver from Nvidia, AMD, or Intel. Each vendor has a driver with support for the game, and youll need to download it first before playing.

If youre still crashing, verify the files within Steam. You can do so by right-clicking the game, selectingProperties,navigating toInstalled files,and choosingVerify integrity of game files.If that fails, you could try uninstalling and reinstalling the game as well.

I suspect youre looking for a more direct fix, and I stumbled upon one that worked for me. My game consistently crashed when starting it up, so I browsed to the folder where it was installed and deleted the shader.cache2 file. Dragons Dogma 2compiles shaders on your GPU when you first load the game, and deleting this cache fixed the crashing on startup issue for me.

Some other suggestions include setting a frame rate cap in the game a good idea regardless given the inconsistent performance and turning off ray tracing. If youre commonly getting crashes during gameplay, the best thing to do right now is update your GPU drivers, update Windows, and wait for further stability patches to improve the situation with the game.

　　Dont believe the Dragons Dogma 2 system requirements

TheDragons Dogma 2system requirements are all wrong. You can see them below, with the developer recommending an Intel Core i7-10700 or AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, along with either an RTX 2080 or RX 6700. This, according to Capcom, will net you performance in the range of 30 frames per second (fps) at 4K.

Thats not the case. Even with an Intel Core i9-13900K and RTX 4090, I was stumbling between 40 fps and 50 fps in towns at 4K. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D and RTX 4070 couldnt handle 40 fps at 4K even outside of towns, and both of those parts are far faster than the recommended system requirements.

Unfortunately,Dragons Dogma 2suffers from poor optimization on the CPU, particularly in towns, so your hardware wont play much of a role in these scenarios. A better CPU will improve performance overall, but bad frame pacing and micro-stuttering sour the experience in towns, even if you have flagship hardware.

　　Horrific town performance in Dragons Dogma 2

Dragons Dogma 2is extremely heavy on the CPU, particularly in towns with a lot of NPCs. Right now, there isnt much you can do to improve this bottleneck. Even when I tested on a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and an Intel Core i9-13900K, which are among the fastest gaming CPUs you can buy, I saw severe stuttering and frame rate drops when entering almost any town. That was true even at the lowest graphics setting.

To demonstrate this, you can watch the video above. Here, Im testing with an RTX 4070 and an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D a very respectable modern gaming rig with the lowest graphics preset. Moving to the the Ultra Performance mode of DLSS at 4K yields no difference in performance and shows stuttering issues. The video here is better than actually playing the game. Encoding at 60 fps through a video smooths out some of the smaller stutters, so the experience is actually worse when playing the game.

None of the graphics options can improve performance here. I tried lowering all of the settings, as well as all of the upscaling modes, and even increasing the Image Quality setting basically a resolution scaling slider to put more load on the GPU. Nothing worked. When youre in a town, regardless of your GPU, it will be underutilized, at least right now. The main method of improving performance right now is to kill NPCs in the town to reduce the strain on the CPU. Thats not where you want to be.

Most of the CPU load focuses on towns, butDragons Dogma 2shows this kind of stuttering elsewhere. You can see in the video above how the game falls into this inconsistent frame time as I approach the top of this hill, which is a path leading into a dungeon. My best guess is that the game is loading enemies and assets for the cave as I approach, despite the fact that I havent entered the cave at all.

　　Tricky upscaling options

Dragons Dogma 2supports Nvidias Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and AMDs FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), along with its own built-in dynamic resolution option. Both DLSS and FSR look and perform well, but they dont get around the brunt of the issues with performance in this game. As mentioned, theres a heavy CPU bottleneck in Dragons Dogma 2.Resolution scaling doesnt help in this situation, so youll need to lean on DLSS and FSR to mainly improve performance in the open world when your GPU has a full load.

Something strange is going on with FSR 3as well. Dragons Dogma 2lists FSR 3 as an option, but it appears thats only handling upscaling. FSR 3 normally comes with upscaling and frame generation. IfDragons Dogma 2is indeed using frame generation, its not making a difference here. From my testing, it appears that FSR 3 was only performing upscaling, making this one of the most misleading options Ive seen in a graphics menu.

Regardless, both DLSS and FSR look great inDragons Dogma 2.I didnt notice flickering artifacts with FSR like you see in a game likeStarfield,making this one of the better FSR implementations you can find right now. Unsurprisingly, its similar to the implementation in Resident Evil 4,which also uses the RE Engine. You can see in the video above that FSR is actually a bit sharper than DLSS. Its worth noting that theres a sharpening slider in the graphics menu, so DLSS can look similarly sharp if you crank it up.

As for stability, DLSS still has an edge. In the video above, you can see the frayed edges on the cloth here start to sputter and fall apart as they float in the wind with FSR. DLSS maintains not only their clarity, but also the separation between layers. If you have access to DLSS, you should use it, but youre not giving up a ton if you have to use FSR instead.

　　Dragons Dogma 2 on PC: the verdict

Dragons Dogma 2is a challenging PC release. The game is understandably demanding, with the extremely detailed world taxing hardware that can render it in its full glory. Those moments of beauty are few and far between, with half-baked shadows and an overwhelming load on the CPU serving as constant reminders of its constraints.

As with a lot of PC releases, the ball is in Capcoms court right now. The developer has promised to deliver updates that improve performance, fix crashes, and offer more options that can lessen the load on the CPU. It could be weeks or even months before the game is fixed, however. Some PC releases that were broken at launch, such as Star Wars Jedi: Survivor,still show major issues over a year later.

Dragons Dogma 2isnt unplayable, and with my dozen or so hours in the game, I have only encountered two crashes. Its far from polished, though. If you plan on picking up the game, expect a bumpy ride as Capcom works through patches.