Dragon's Dogma 2 Performance Review - PS5 vs Xbox Series X/S vs PC

ign.com:

Capcom really upped its game with their RE-Engine that debuted in 2017’s Resident Evil 7. It has since seen Capcom through 16 games and three console generations, but none were as demanding and out of that design scope as Dragon’s Dogma 2, which is probably why it’s the first to make the versatile engine visibly bulge at the seams. This is a game that relies on physically based materials, photogrammetry textures, and realistic human models and animation, alongside a fantastical and mythical world, but the bumpers come off in places where we see the open-ended, dynamic, and systemic game design with CPU-controlled enemies and teammates, vast, open plains to explore, and dense towns with constant data streaming. This flips the linear nature of the core engine's focus on its head, raising the demands on the throughput, teams, memory management, and, ultimately, performance.

Graphics, Technology, and Visual Comparison

The RE Engine always delivers good looking games and Dragon’s Dogma 2 is no different. Obviously, it is a vast increase over the original X360, PS3 version. Offering excellent texture details, dense geometry, large and looming creatures, dynamic weather and time of day. Long view dense, high and reactive Foliage, volumetrics, screen space reflections and looks to use mesh shading, tessellated ground and good shadow maps and dynamic lights. Which offers a game that has the hallmarks of the RE Engine and Capcom art design but on a much larger scale. Scaling from the highest-end PC with an RTX 4090 down to the Xbox Series S offers up a vast range of hardware specifications (let’s ignore the Steam Deck for now). Let’s start with those important options and numbers Dragon’s Dogma 2 offers. There’s a single mode across all consoles, but using the PC we can see a selection of adjustments with a nice visual example for many which helps understand the changes and effects you can make within the RE-Engine, but something jumps out. The range of options within each