Dragon’s Dogma 2 PC is Over 50% Faster with the Latest Patch

Dragon’s Dogma 2 had a rough PC launch, with CPU bottlenecks limiting performance with and without ray tracing. The deficit was especially glaring in towns and settlements, dropping below 60 FPS even on a GeForce RTX 4090 + Core i9-13900KF setup. Our testing revealed a crippling CPU bottleneck with ray-tracing enabled, with the GPU being idle for ~50% of the frametime. Disabling ray tracing improved frame times and lows, but the result remained sub-par.

Since then, Capcom has released two title updates for Dragon’s Dogma 2 without mention of performance improvements. We retested the game on the same hardware, and recorded massive FPS bumps in crowded areas, especially with ray tracing enabled.

Performance Related Terms

GPU Busy Deviation: Delta between GPU Active and frametime. The lower the better. Higher percentages indicate a strong CPU bottleneck.

1% percentile FPS: Only 1% of the recorded framerate values are lower than this. This is a good measure of performance in resource-intensive areas.

At 1440p (ray tracing on), the game runs 10.5% faster on average with 18% higher lows, translating to fewer stutters and lags. The gains are magnified at 4K, with the lows jumping from the previously reported 30.7 FPS to 47.2 FPS (+54%) with the latest update. The averages show a smaller but consistent 14% improvement within castle walls.

The average performance uplift is similar with ray tracing disabled, but the lows don’t see the level of improvement as with RT enabled. The 1440p and 4K (graphics settings at max) frame rates see a 9% and 14% bump with the latest patch, respectively.

At the “Low” and “High” quality presets, the gains are modest to nominal as the game becomes more and more GPU-bound.

Looking at the frametime chart, we can see that the game is significantly less GPU-bound in towns and settlements. At 4K with ray tracing, the GPU-Busy Deviation is down to 32% (previously 50%).

In sheer rasterization, the GPU-Busy Deviation has reduced from 28% (at launch) to 18% following the latest updates.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 now runs significantly smoother with a lower CPU bottleneck, but there’s still work to be done. The game still wastes considerable time being CPU limited, keeping the GPU idle for 15-30% of the render time.