Dragon's Dogma 2 - PS5/Xbox Series X/S and PC - Digital Foundry Tech Review

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compelling a very in-depth character creator here we have a lot of flexibility to tweak our created Arisen character and create something unique the rendering of the character looks pretty good good here even though High Fidelity facial rendering isn't exactly a key part of the game and juggling through various presets and options for a few minutes I didn't stumble across anything particularly uncanny or off-putting which is a good accomplishment for this kind of player-driven character editor after a short introductory sequence we enter the game's open world setting proper which is quite stunning at times I think the standout technology here is The Game's use of Ray traced Global elimination which makes the Environmental Lighting look consistently high quality across a range of conditions we get beautiful subtle occlusion in the intersections of rock faces diffuse shading from tree branches and fine Shadow Fall Off around the mouths of caves in these indirectly lit areas which are already depicting areas of the world that are draped in Shadow we get a really fine impression of how light is subtly uded by surrounding geometry I think this effect is most striking in the game's major town area the buildings here just look outstanding with this lighting presentation when looking at the underside of wood braced floors or Bridges or the crevices between buildings the game just looks very realistic I love the way light bounces off stonework softly Illuminating adjacent walls or how the light reflects off the wood floor here it's a very refined and very consistent lighting presentation and more than anything else it just feels natural the color contribution from the sky is also quite evident especially as Dusk and Dawn approach for some smaller scale details it doesn't hold up quite as well Interiors for instance often seem to have objects that glow slightly with a kind of presentation that's more typical with real-time Lighting in games I also noticed that the secondary lighting contribution from lights was sometimes muted like in this indoor scene here Dragon Dogma 2 tends to have very Stark and slightly harsh lighting with steep contrast and you do generally see effective indirect lighting it's really just these interiors that look a little lacking at times just about everywhere else the results are pretty great though at typical viewing distances I couldn't even really spot any RT noise or breakup in the image aside from the lighting characteristics changing slightly as unor objects the game takes some interesting approaches to lighting as well that we don't necessarily see in a lot of other games like the original Knight is almost pitch black with the player character relying on lanterns to make out anything at all this is true to the way light behaves in real life absent of full moon or artificial illumination and can make nighttime excursions particularly frightening times of day also transition extremely quickly which we see in some other titles The Horizon games are a prominent example although to a lesser degree here the game seems to suddenly transition between roughly four states night Dawn day and dusk with slower lighting travel in between there's no need to transition between GI bakes so I am imagine this is an artistic flourish or a concession simply to avoid the artifacts that can become obvious with steeply angled Shadow Maps these shadow Maps look perfectly fine but do often showcase Shadow aliasing and the expected lack of Shadow fall off at a distance there are some distracting Cascade levels as well when the game tries to resolve fine Shadow detail with more distant Cascades revealing low resolution slow moving Shadow artifacts screen space Reflections are also in use here we get SSR combined with a cubemap fallback which works decently well or somewhat poorly depending on the camera angle and including geometry like in other re engine titles we can see very pronounced SSR artifacts when characters get in front of SSR detail but it's not too bad here because the camera is a little bit more zoomed out while we're looking at the water here the normal mapped surface ripples on the water surface do seem to update at an uneven rate which is a little distracting ohs side of those lighting details I think the world looks quite appealing there's a lot of foliage packed into the surroundings when traversing the open world and the environmental density is quite satisfying that applies to the geometry as well you can still spot the occasional straight edge here and there but the assets usually look good and the game still manages to fit into a spelt under 70 GB package on the consoles which is likely a lot smaller because of the aforementioned rtgi my only major graphical Gra here is that some of the game's uninteractive sequences especially the dialogue sequences aren't up to the standard that a lot of players might expect these scenes don't have the most flattering framing or careful Direction and the facial animation particularly the lip sync is very basic Arisen I'm afraid I don't understand your meaning does it have ought to do with why you were taken to the castle some of the more landscape oriented cutcenes tend to look quite flattering but the standard narrative segments tends to be well below other big budget games including other open world titles that face similar content constraints this may or may not be a big issue from your own perspective and Dragon Dogma 2 is decidedly a more nonlinear less story focused experience than other titles but it is still a pretty obvious area where development resources weren't expended and the result looks a lot less polished than the game's beautiful Exteriors in visual settings the PS5 and series X are both basically matched with each other as you might expect both consoles have similar Shadow resolution draw distances and texturing both machines also use a checkerboard rendering technique which is a familiar choice for re engine titles but unfortunately the image resolve on series X appears to be broken as of the current patch with the visuals completely obscured by a fine grid of checkerboarding artifacts it's a really disappointing issue issue and it should be resolved as soon as possible re engine titles do seem to have recurrent issues with checkerboard rendering on consoles and it never quite seems to work properly on PC so this isn't totally unexpected but it's quite bad in this instance producing an actual pixel count here proves unusually difficult the game has motion war that can't be disabled making it hard to find raw edges and the series X is virtually uncountable as a result of its image quality issues on PS5 though I do believe the game is checkerboarding to 4K which would extend to the series X build as well probably the PS5 at least has decent enough image quality and it does a largely competent job of resolving a crisp image foliage does pose a bit of a concern here though as it tends to have considerable artifacting in motion and there is some ghosting as well performance unfortunately is not very good both PS5 and series X have an unlocked frame rate here with performance that generally lies between 30 and 45 FPS or so that means a juty inconsistent output in general play basically no matter what you are doing at any given time there really should be a 30fps cap in place if not as the default then at least as an option the game's Central City area is the only real deviation from this trend here we get results that are often in the 20s as we Sprint around the game really doesn't feel great to play here on either console which is caused by a CPU limit Capcom is taking some considerable steps to reduce CPU load like limiting NPC draw to a comically short distance from the player but it isn't enough to produce a decent frame rate on the GPU limited side of things some combat encounters can also dip into the 20s though usually briefly these open World areas don't seem to cause as much of a CPU burden so any frame rate Wows here are the likely byproduct of the game's high resolution and rtgi use comparing the two consoles side by side for a moment the series X scores roughly a 10% performance win over the PS5 in matching shots coming up three or four fps to the better of the PS5 this isn't totally like for like because of the series X's issues with resolving a proper checkerboarded image but this does seem to be a pretty straightforward series X win at least when GPU limited when CPU limited the results are a little more ambiguous with the PS5 seeming to take a performance win while performing the same run around the city here the one Saving Grace here is series X which can combine vrr support with low frame rate compensation at 120 HZ output the game looks quite smooth here relatively speaking with most frame time levels sorted out City areas are a lot less convincing though as you might expect with very high variance between frames and PS5 consoles don't support LFC in this game so don't expect a stable vrr presentation there the series s version of Dragon Dogma 2 isn't really a close match for the other console versions of the game firstly the game's rtgi has been stripped out on Series S just look at how there's no bounce light on the shadowed wall here or how the shadowed region under the roof here is uniformly dark basically anywhere we look in the city area or in the open world the lack of rtgi is quite evident that's not to say that the series s version has badl looking lighting it does appear to have ambient occlusion and some kind of non-r Trace GI but the results are clearly a generation behind the other consoles and the game looks flat and a little bit video gamey compared to the very natural results we see on the other console platforms Shadow resolution has been clipped quite a bit to with pretty messy looking Shadows at a distance the issue here is that the sun position is constantly moving in Dragon Dogma 2 which means the shadow positions are also constantly moving this isn't much of an issue on the higher end consoles but here the shadow resolution seems to be quite compromised producing very distracting Flicker and artifacting in the shadows I also noticed what appeared to be a texture bug where on a couple of occasions the series s version failed to load in key high resolution textures requiring a restart to fix I don't know whether this is best chocked up to the series s's memory limitations or whether this is just some bad luck with unintended Behavior but it should be resolved in general though the series s has perfectly fine texture art though it does sometimes sport visibly lower res textures unfortunately the series s version of the game has the same checkerboarding issue we saw on series X which results in very poor image quality I can't really comment on the resolution here but I can say that it appears a lot softer and lower detail than the series X version suggesting a substantially lower resolution Target performance is typically very similar to the other console versions of the game expect the same jety unlocked frame rate with significant issues in more populated areas relative to the other consoles performance seems to be in rough alignment with the PS5 while GPU limited so the various visual cutbacks haven't produced a better running game necessarily they've just roughly kept pace that's enough for me for now but Alex is going to interject here for a moment with some thoughts on the PC version thanks for the handoff Oliver and given everything Oliver's just said we know that this game's console performance and Technical considerations are going to transfer over to the PC version and as such that means we're looking at a game that is profoundly heavy in some interesting and unexpected ways but before I get into the game's overall performance let me briefly go over the user experience in the game when you first start the game there is a Shader pre-compilation process which took around 2 and 1/2 minutes on a ryzen 7 7800 x3d this is great to see and in practice I do not think I encountered any super obvious Shader compilation stutter where I could easily point at it and say yes that frame time increase was definitely Shader compilation that is a good thing but that does not mean the game is stutter-free when playing the game the opening chapter had around two moments where I was scratching my head based upon really big frame time stutters that I saw on the ryzen 7 7800 x3d they were inexplicable and jarring they made the game grind to a halt momentarily and I'm not sure what caused them like other previous re engine games on console and PC there is also a little bit of stutter when Crossing invisible boundaries in the game World this is known as traversal stutter here's a good example when leaving the first camp in the game every time I just about Crest this tiny Hill here when leaving the camp I see a frametime spike of either 33 50 or 66 milliseconds on the ryzen 7800 x3d slower processors will see these spikes more often and they will be bigger on a technical level though I would say these frame time spikes from traversal stutter happened less often than I've seen in previous re engine games Beyond those things though and the city performance which I will get into shortly I would say the game has smooth enough performance in the countryside when just killing goblins and stuff there are some other user experience things I want to mention here and the first is that the menus in these Capcom games on PC are still not great the menu navigation is once again kind of heads scratching and I'll show you what I mean look at this area here in the menu with a mouse I cannot click on the things that I see here even though they're plainly visible right in front of me to actually access them you have to click the total menu option above them in the tree and then you can click the sub options this design doesn't make any sense on a mouse which is a 2d pointer I find this stuff irksome and it makes needless friction in all the Capcom titles I've seen on this engine but enough of that use your experience stuff now let me get into the big controversial thing this game is very CPU Limited in its performance when you get near populous areas performance goes down way down now I would say in and of itself this is not bad if a game is especially ambitious but I need to make a point about why it feels so rough if frame rate in a game goes down but frame times are similar to one another the motion is less detailed and there are less frames to see in motion but it should at least look and feel consistent I just covered Horizon forbidden West and the PC version there when CPU limited still has really good frame times that are consistent in this game that is not the case when the frame rates go down near the city in this game the frame times become erratic and so no matter what your average frame rate may be 30 60 FPS whatever the game still doesn't look smooth your average frame rate isn't important here what your frame times look like is on a 7800 x3d for example when trying to Target 60fps with v sync it is never consistent and good feeling 60fps vsync there that is because the frame times are erratic spiking up constantly to around 30 or 50 milliseconds here I imagine the AI load is the primary issue here along with the density of the city we know the CPU is the culprit here due to how GPU utilization goes down heavily when the frame rate is dipping and when the frame time start to become more erratic so as you can see a really big CPU like the 7800 x3d does not present this game in a visually smooth way at all in the city on something smaller like a ryzen 53600 I have noticed that the core spread of utilization is pretty good when running around the city in this little Benchmark I made at Max settings you can see some pretty good utilization spread there on the ryzen 7 7800 x3d though I would say the spread of the utilization is less uniform and more wild and changing all the time as some threads peak in the' 70s While others go idle from the user perspective the game appears to scale fine on more limited pools of cores and threads as shown on the 3600 but the spread of load on the 7800 x3d does look less than stellar and I imagine there could be Improvement there over time potentially to make the game Less single-threaded in that aspect when I run these two processors next to one another in The Benchmark I made we can see that the 7800 x3d has an average frame rate that is just under two times that of the ryzen 53600 but look at the frame times they're OB obviously a lot lot better overall the ryzen 53600 will have a performance average of around 30 FPS but it is anything but smooth due to those wild frame times you see in the bottom right I would say they're pretty disastrous the frame times are definitely not at all good on the 7800 x3d but I kind of consider the city area unplayable on the ryzen 53600 as Oliver showed in his segment if you run the same sequence on the Xbox series X it also runs very poorly with bad frame times the average performance was 10% worse than that which I found on the ryzen 53600 the Xbox is not going to be running Max settings here of course but I'm just showing this Xbox footage to you here to prove that you can get quite better results on PC as long as you have a more modern ryzen or Intel chip so City performance here is going to be very controversial and I think many people might just stop playing the game as soon as they get to this area as it's kind of jarring the entire game is of course not the city environment but it is something that stands out for sure an aspect that complicates performance in the city in this game is that the performance on the CPU is worse at higher resolutions that is counterintuitive but let me show you here at 4K we can see the game when CPU limited is nearly 10% slower on average than 1080p while CPU limited I have seen this in games in the past like Crisis for example I imagine the game is drawing more things at a distance at higher resolutions which makes the game heavier at higher resolutions on the CPU this this is interesting as it means Xbox series X or PS5 are going to be especially hit as they are targeting High resolutions like 4K with weak CPUs on PC the options give you some leeway to help this CPU limited situation you can turn off rracing which gets rid of ratra global illumination and this massively affects the realism of the image I would say but if you look back in the city you can see a 12% performance Bump by turning RT off on a ryzen 53600 LCB limited you can also turn down other settings to their lowest to further potato ify the game but that will only increase performance 6% over turning off RT so you can improve performance a little bit by massively reducing lighting quality for example but nothing can actually save you from the performance being Troublesome in the city I would say it's still largely bad even with rt off in this sense since turning off rate tracing makes the game look a lot worse and because you cannot really help the performance when it is at its worst I would say the game currently does not have optimized settings that can be made for it even without generalized optimized settings I think there are some good settings in the menu here don't get me wrong and I'm very happy to see finally dlss support in the re engine in a big title with that being said dlss is not perfect in this game dlss definitely does anti-aliasing well and it does not have big ghost on movement or particle effects like FSR 2 does but it does have an issue with small vegetation where it blurs the vegetation over itself as it moves in the wind dlss definitely doesn't do this in all games so maybe it's fixable here with patching but at the moment you can notice this issue still I would recommend using it if you have an RTX GPU Beyond this I don't think there's too much to report in this version of the game at this time I find the game generally graphically competent and I like the ray Trace GI it has though I am very surprised not to see competent RT Reflections here as that was mentioned in the advertising for the game on the videoid blog based upon what I'm seeing with the Reflections in this game it just looks like screen space reflections with a very rudimentary fallback that looks like a q map perhaps more complex Reflections were axed before release just like frame gen which might have been axed before release as yeah the game currently doesn't support frame gen dss3 or FSR 3 Performance is definitely going to be the thing that people are going to be talking about here and my recommendation at the moment is to maybe wait to play the game to see what patching does as we can see with the CPU load between different processors there could be some work done here to improve the utilization of 8 core or other larger processors and perhaps that will help the situation on PC even more if you do not want to wait you can of course just categorically ignore their performance in the city and just play in the countryside having fun and that is really all I have to say here so back to you Oliver so that's the technical side of the game accounted for then but what about the overall experience Dragon Dogma 2 is a game that really tries to immerse you within its world and create an open-ended environment for the player to explore there is a quest log but it's quite barebones and many quests lack way points with players expected to make their own way through the game some quests also have an expiry attached a fixed amount of time before they are no longer accessible and will remain forever incomplete that's the kind of idea that is going to excite some people but turn others off who want a more roller coaster Style story-driven game it's got certain souls-like elements as well like decreasing your available Health when you restart from a checkpoint if that sounds like something you might like I think there's a lot to enjoy here though I suspect the party-driven combat might not be to everyone's liking on a technical level though I think there's a lot to appreciate here and some key areas that could use Improvement the visuals on series X and PS5 often look brilliant with beautiful rtgi that hopefully represents what we can expect from the re engine in future titles Series S is less appealing without RT of any kind and suffering from low res Shadows Series S and X have totally broken checkerboarding with a very messy resolve and all console platforms suffer from heavily CPU bound performance in some areas alongside an unlocked frame rate that gives them an unstable feel even at the best of times the PC version has the same CPU as expected alongside some other inconsistencies and visual issues I think Dragon Dogma 2 is a great graphical achievement but unfortunately it's let down by some configuration issues on the consoles and heavily CPU bound performance on all platforms there's a lot to appreciate visually but I would like to see some improvements in these areas post relase if you enjoyed this video please like subscribe and press the bell for YouTube notifications check out the patreon at dig founder. net for exclusive and Early Access content and to get in touch use social media thanks for watching

Channel: Digital Foundry

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Length: 24min 38sec (1478 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2024