Dragon’s Dogma 2 now runs notably better on PC, but it’s still a mess
Dragon’s Dogma 2 now runs much smoother on PC
While update 1 for Dragon’s Dogma 2 didn’t promise major PC performance improvements, we had heard some gamers reporting much smoother gameplay in cities. Since this was our major complaint about Dragon’s Dogma 2 in our PC Performance Review, we thought that we would test these claims.
We booted the game with the same hardware setup and drivers as our original Dragon’s Dogma 2 testing. The only change we made was updating Dragon’s Dogma 2 on Steam. Then, we retested the game in the city of  Vernworth, one of the most demanding areas of the game. To test this game we used our standard games test system with an Intel i9-13900K CPU with an Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti graphics card.
More Stable Frametimes
What we saw during our testing was dramatically smoother frametimes. While our average framerate improved by less than 5%, our 1st percentile framerate increased by 29%. This change makes Dragon’s Dogma 2’s frametimes a lot more stable in cities. Even though our average framerate barely increased, the gap between our average and lower percentile framerates lessened significantly.
While Dragon’s Dogma 2 is still very CPU-limited in towns and cities, the game now feels less choppy and unstable in these areas. This makes the game a lot more playable on PC. That said, there is still a lot of room for improvement.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 still needs major CPU optimisations on PC
While update 1 has made the game a lot more stable in CPU-limited areas, performance in these areas remains poor. Yes, update 1 has made the game run much more smoothly in CPU-limited areas, but we are still dipping far below 60 FPS on a PC with an i9-13900K at 1080p. Dragon’s Dogma 2’s city areas are not impressive enough to justify these huge performance costs, and we hope that future updates will deliver significant performance improvements.
Thankfully, the patch notes for Dragon’s Dogma 2’s first update made it clear that “Improvements to frame rate are planned for future updates.” Let’s hope that future updates will give Dragon’s Dogma 2 a significant FPS boost.
You can join the discussion on Dragon’s Dogma 2’s increased framerate stability on PC on the OC3D Forums.
