It’s a Mess – Dragon’s Dogma 2 PC Performance Review

CPU Issues

Dragon’s Dogma 2 has major CPU performance issues on PC

We played Dragon’s Dogma 2 on a PC with an Intel i9-13900K processor, Corsair Vengeance DDR5-6000 memory, and a Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4070 Ti graphics card. With this high-spec system, this game’s performance tanks in large settlements. This is especially true in our benchmarking scene in Vernworth.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is very CPU-limited on PC. While 60+ FPS average framerates are possible with an i9-13900K CPU, frametimes are extremely inconsistent. Typically, 1st percentile and 5th percentile framerates are very close to eachother. In this case, they are miles apart. Both are also far from our average framerate. In built up areas, frametimes in Dragon’s Dogma 2 can see huge spikes, making the game look and feel juddery.

The inconsistent frametimes in this game make built up areas almost unplayable on high-end CPUs. In cities, I’m tempted to cap this game’s framerate at 30 FPS for the sale of a little consistency.

As you can see below, disabling cores only has a small impact on game performance. We had to disable all but 4 cores to even have a noticeable drop in perceived performance. Even then, the performance drop is minor. This game is clearly not making very effective use of high CPU core counts.

Will lower graphical settings help? Nope!

While lower graphical settings can increase this game’s average framerate, frametimes remain very inconsistent. As you can see, 1st percentile and 5th percentile framerates barely change when settings are lowered. That means that this game’s performance remains just as inconsistent as before. In fact, it is more inconsistent, as lower percentile framerates are now further away from our average framerate.