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

to bring it down strike fast and true and our Quarry shall [Music] fall Capcom really upped its game with their re engine that debuted in 2017's Resident Evil 7 it has seen Capcom through 16 games and three console Generations but none were as demanding and out of that designed scope as Dragon's Dogma 2 which is probably why it's the first to make this verse vertile engine visibly bulge at the seams this is a game that relies on physically based materials photogrametry 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 planes 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 the teams memory management and ultimately [Music] performance the re engine always delivers goodlook games and Dragon's Dogma 2 is no different obviously it's a vast increase over the original Xbox 360 and PS3 versions offering excellent texture details dense geometry large and looming creatures Dynamic weather and time of day Long View distance dense and highly reactive foliage volumetrics screen space Reflections and it looks to use mes shading tesselated ground and good Shadow maps and dynamic lights which offers a game that has all the hallm marks of the re engine and capcon art design but on a much much larger scale scaling from the highest end PC with an RTX 490 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 nice visual examples for many which helps understand the changes and effects you make within the re engine but something jumps out the range of options within each setting is limited most are a simple onoff toggle or only a low or high setting with textures and image quality being the most vital all three console versions look close to identical in base settings which align close to the maximum on PC with some reductions specifically there's no rate racing on Series S but it is present on PlayStation 5 and Xbox series X ambient occlusion is a screen space variety on Series S rather than the signed distant fields or rate tracing option of the PC's highest setting and bigger consoles mesh level of detail looks closest to high rather than Max and shadows again are closest to high rather than maximum the textas themselves are likely high or Max on PS5 and Xbox series X but close to low on Xbox series s which is a problem for that console Series S and series X reduce the image quality relative to the PC at least it comes in close to the fifth level out of 10 on the setting slider for image quality and closer to three or four for the series s some areas also look to have slightly lower level of detail on the series consoles but this is very minor this leaves the PlayStation 5 with a substantially sharper and more detailed image than the other two machines a reverse of what we saw with Resident Evil 4 remake thus the setting appears to be Shader pass and pixel sampling related it effectively impacts textures Shadows ambient occlusion Alpha effects so all grass fire rocks signs and people are impacted with a blockier more pixelated image and softer details due to lower samples which is reduced further by the temporal anti- ausing pass it stands out in comparisons and although not detrimental on series X during Standalone play the image quality reduction is one of the largest I have seen since Resident Evil 4 the series s though is a huge reduction over PS5 and even series X with textures and image quality being severely degraded grass Alpha is another small concession and it's quite notable relative to the other two consoles the final piece of image quality as per previous games is the resolution output Choice all three consoles use the interlay setting by the looks of things and this means a full 4K output on PS5 and series X via a half width rasterization pass on the horizontal axis the series s drops to 2560x1440 Output coming up from a 1280x 1440p base pixel counters amongst you may notice that this is half the pixels of a full 4k on the bigger consoles and less pixel than a 1920x 1080 output on the series s ultimately these are the same targets as Resident Evil 4's resolution mode for each [Music] console as we covered in our preview Dragon's Dogma 2 may have an unlocked frame rate but 60 FPS is all but impossible to achieve on consoles and from all my tests impossible to lock out on PC including with that RTX 1490 however the reasons for this are not straightforward and my testing had to go deeper on some aspects let me explain during development many games run with no cap on the performance just limited by the TV or monitor sync limit capped or half Ray options are normally added later the fact the review version is still unlocked like this is a small red flag that makes me wonder what other Corners might have been cut to get this out the door but of course Capcom has released games on weaker consoles with the same unlocked rate even when the console could never hit 60 FPS such as Resident Evil 4 on the PlayStation 4 by leaving it unlocked though overall performance can be improved in comparison to a 33 millisecond cap whilst in development the reason is Dragon Dogma 2 often becomes bandwidth or fill rate limited and this is a bigger issue on consoles due to the contention they have with GPU and CPU sh wearing the same memory bus and bandwidth a PC has two dedicated memory pools which has its own issues but here it's an advantage and this is why we see the use of interlacing and on the Xbox consoles a lowering of the image quality settings to reduce pressure with the series s being impacted the most due to its much smaller Ram allocation and bandwidth on all consoles though we see similar readouts often hovering between the lower end of 30 to 40 series X is slightly better than the p S 5 within 4% on average but most often being within margin of error once we get any heavy Alpha effects such as fire breathing dragons flooding water or dense foliage in Alpha we see this bandwidth contention crop up dropping us into the 50s to 70 millisecond range on frame times which means bouts of sub30 FPS the other big issue and what explains why the team at capcon has taken the choice to ship the highest resolution and image quality on each are the towns verw worth for example stresses the engine and Hardware most with many aspects it was never designed for large dense open areas High geometry and material samples large number of MPCs with Dynamic pathf finding AI emerging gameplay State models and then the biggest one consistent data streaming and management here all platforms struggle with frame times bouncing up and down like a ping-pong ball in a run to the tavern which is a well-known tradition here in England both consoles are sub 30 FPS as the CPU and memory demands cause erratic performance which hits its deepest low as you enter the pub and the MPCs are instantiated and then allocated a state the faster the hardware or the more reductions made on the amount of data and tasks the platform is pushing the better your performance will be here but on my highend 5800 x3d which is an 8 core 16 thread CPU at 4.5 GHz we are often in the 30fps range here whilst moving around the T the consoles do not use the SSD in dedicated Hardware Designs very well or maybe even at all with the impact being higher here than you would expect specifically on the PS5 as that has more silicon dedicated to alleviate data seek and load from the CPU the series X is slightly worse in the CPU impacted areas but again it's academic as neither delivers a stable frame time readout the series s performance is close enough to both with it being on a average just below the PS5 but without a frame rate analysis they all feel about the same in play but the series s will dip into the same bandwidth and CPU heavy sections even with those significant reductions relative to the bigger consoles the smaller console delivers close enough performance metrics here not to miss anything but the biggest doubs are the sacrifices in textures and image quality and that small pool of ram highlights the impacts on how Dragon's Dogma 2 looks far more than the frame rate does I am sure with more time and effort the team can improve the current state on all formats but the series s is the one most in need due to the degraded image it has and even on a 1080b screen this is an obvious ey saw a variable refresh rate or vrr screen will not help here as all of the consoles are often below the required range and can even stutter into 50 80 milliseconds frequently during many areas and that cannot be resolved by the technology a cyclops oh PR be on your guard the PC version starts well a direct X12 API kicks off a fixed Shader compilation pass and then once complete you never have to think about that again Dragons Dogma 2 on the steam deck as it stands currently is unplayable though it's likely engine memory bandwidth and API related but even at a forced 640x 480 output and low settings we are seeing a poultry 7 to4 FPS at best at the same time this is the first game from Capcom that appears to have had a high-end PC Focus From the Start and may have even had a PC developed game from the off due to the big RPG Market PC has I'm led to believe this is because it offers both dlss and FSR options right out of the box with Nvidia latency boost also within the menu both are better options than interlac so long as they are set at balanced or higher with d LSS being clearly Superior from a GPU perspective my RTX 4090 has far more performance and bandwidth than anything else and at such a 4K output using dlss quality offers a vastly superior image quality to consoles the rate race Global illumination can also be turned on but the Improvement here was often very slight to Invisible outside but improved ambient Shadows inside and aside some edge cases such as on water bodies the performance cost may not be worth it for most during the GPU heavier sections out in the the wild fighting Griffins trolls or dragons Dragons Dogma 2 holds a close lock on 60 FPS and even higher if you have the screen to support it but it can dip and sway during rapid action and fast camera movement or streaming sections under 60 FPS often enough to notice but a g-sync or S screen would help here these are again the same issues with CPU memory and data causing the GPU to stall and wait for work which means we get delays in our frame delivery and thus frame rates can still drop below 60 but even on the RTX 490 you cannot run the game at Native 4K it's consistently somewhere between the 30s and 40s in the towns the GPU is much less of an issue and here the CPU and data streaming demands mean we are again down into the 30s with stutter we're fully CPU memory bound here and no GPU performance can resolve this because it's not a GPU issue it remains something for the developers to attempt to resolve and just as this review was closing out the team confirmed my findings they plan to investigate the high CPU demands due to the MPC State models and location tracking so an update should Land once ready moving down the snack and sitting in between the PS5 and the RTX 490 is my AMD powered RX 6800 with a six core 12 thread 5600x we can run Dragon's Dogma 2 with a superior image quality using FSR 3 set to balanced at 4K and settings close to the PlayStation 5 and we get a 45 to 60 FPS performance in those grassy Hills and creature battles and of course we are always at the mercy of the CPU performance in those towns and as such we can see lower performance and more stutters as the GPU is left waiting for work on PC memory demands can exceed 8 GB of system RAM and 13 GB of vram Which is far higher than expected levels which pretty much sums up the performance requirements at this point for the game loading is not such a highlight again pointing back to the core aspects of data and streaming memory management it still is very fast considering the size of the world but across PS5 series consoles and SSD equipped PCS they're all approximately 15 seconds to load in of course this will be more dependent on a faster CPU than the SSD speeds and this is reinforced by the series x beating the PlayStation 5 when picking which platform to play Dragons Dogma 2 on be aware that PC players get the best best choice of options and image quality thanks to this being the first game from Capt Tom to ship with dlss and FSR I offering enhanced image quality over consoles however CPU and memory impacts Remain the biggest cause for concern in performance which highlights why the team has pushed settings and resolution as high as possible on the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox series X and S no matter what the Fright rate is going to drop to sub30 FPS when you're in town a closer hold to that Benchmark with better image quality is their aim rather than large spikes from 60 to 30 and degraded image quality the whole time and this is where they need to improve as even at the lowest settings on PC we leave 70% or more GPU performance on the table and still run under 30 FPS in these worst case instances if I was a betting man I would suspect over the next two months or so patches will come that will improve the consistency if not the overall performance across the board none of this racts from the superb game that Dragon Dogma 2 is but if you are sensitive to frame rate fluctuations it may be worth giving them the time before embarking on this Majestic Journey because the performance issues that are along for the ride at the moment could be enough to ruin that adventure and that's it for the Deep dive into games technology and all things Dragon Dogma related remember if you like what we do here on IG performance reviews and IGN then keep it IGN and we'll catch you on the next one a

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Id: IPrO2ZHQ3mM

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 21 2024