Dragon's Dogma 2 PC Performance Is a Mess, But It Didn't Have to Be

ign.com:

Its no secret that while Dragon's Dogma 2 is great, performance has been an issue from the jump – particularly on PC. There's a reason for it, Capcom has explained NPCs are individually simulated by your CPU, which makes this game incredibly dependent on your processor. Play the game for an hour or so and you'll realize how much the game benefits from this approach, but unless you have a top-end CPU paired with the best RAM you can muster, you're going to have a rough time with the frame rate, especially in cities.

And then even if you do have the best gaming PC money could buy, you're still going to see frame rate drops. It's a shame, especially because the issues easily could have been avoided, and it's not entirely Capcom's fault.

Capcom's RE Engine is largely responsible for the bugbears you'll run into when playing the game. Reiterating our performance review, the RE Engine was primarily designed for linear games, like Resident Evil, which it's named for. Making it worse is advanced pathing for every NPC, which is why even on my Core i9-14900K, my framerate will drop to 50 fps in towns – where dozens of citizens devour my CPU bandwidth.

Dragon's Dogma 2 being so reliant on your CPU and memory was kind of unexpected. By and large, games – particularly action role playing games – have depended more on the best graphics cards as time has gone on, as GPUs like the RTX 4080 Super have been improving faster than CPUs have. Then, out of the blue we get a game that needs a hefty CPU to run at its best, and we get stuck with poor performance.

Making things worse is Capcom's choice of upscaling technology: DLSS 2.0 and FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.0. Having both these upscalers included is better than not having one at all, or only having one, but neither of them really address the elephant in the room: high CPU usage. It's little wonder that modders have found a way to add DLSS 3.0, which was apparently already in the game files anyway. Unfortunately, as things stand