Dragon’s Dogma 2 frame rate issues were largely caused by the NPCs’ thinking, developers say 

Capcom’s latest update for Dragon’s Dogma 2 allows players on both PC and consoles to choose between prioritizing graphics or performance. With the new patch, PS5 and Xbox users can expect the game to render at 1728p, with a frame rate between 50 and 60 FPS when playing in performance mode. 

Performance issues, especially drops in frame rate, are something Dragon’s Dogma 2’s developers have been tackling through updates ever since the game’s launch earlier this year. With the release of the latest October 17 patch, the developers spoke to  Famitsu about the main cause behind the frame rate issues and how they went about fixing it. 

“In Dragon’s Dogma 2, CPU power is allocated to process the thoughts of each NPC as well as the effect on character physics. Therefore, in scenes where many NPCs appear at once, like in towns, the CPU load would get extremely high, which in some cases affected the frame rate. Since CPU was our bottleneck, GPU-related solutions like lowering the resolution had little effect on improving frame rate,” the team explained. 

Dragon’s Dogma 2’s creators made a point of expanding upon the first game with more a complex NPC Affinity system and more realistic AI behavior, but it seems that the sheer number of NPCs and the load involved in processing their thinking became difficult to manage in terms of optimization. 

Therefore, ever since the game’s launch, the team has been “reworking how NPCs’ thoughts are processed and making small tweaks, including changing the order in which processes are executed” in order to remedy the performance issues troubling players. The resulting reduced CPU load has allowed the game to run at an improved frame rate, between 50 and 60 FPS, on consoles and PC as of October 17. 

The developers also mention that they are continuing to listen to feedback from both overseas and Japanese players, and will keep making future changes and adjustments to the game in order of priority. 

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is available for the PC (Steam), PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.