You won’t get stable 60 FPS in Dragon’s Dogma 2 on any platform.

Tomorrow marks the release of Capcom’s highly anticipated RPG Dragon’s Dogma 2, which scored a very strong 9 out of 10 in our review. And while it’s receiving rave reviews from critics on most aspects, there’s one negative that pops up almost everywhere, and that’s the technical side. And still under analysis he works Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia and Michael Thompson (aka NXGamer) provided their own analysis for IGN, which you can find in both video and text form.

As usual, to create the game, Capcom used its in-house RE Engine, which has proven itself particularly well in the Resident Evil series, as well as in other games. But if we ignore Monster Hunter Rise, which was significantly limited by the Switch’s hardware, this will be the first big test of how it holds up in the open world. And, unfortunately, not very good.

The biggest problems occur on consoles, where the game on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X runs in 4K, but at an interlaced resolution. This is a fairly old method, but Capcom still offers it in games. Only half the pixels are displayed on the horizontal axis of each frame, which results in increased performance but also possible artifacts. On the Xbox Series S, you can count on 1440i.

According to Thompson’s findings, image quality on Xbox is slightly worse than on PS, with XSS clearly suffering the most, and textures not loading quickly enough or not loading at all. The problem will likely be in the memory, which on the one hand is 6 GB less, but also with significantly less bandwidth.

Either way, this is the lesser of the two problems, since it’s primarily about frame rate. Much to the chagrin of many gamers, Capcom has a habit of leaving the frame rate in its games unlocked even if it is far from a stable 60fps, and this is the case with Dragon’s Dogma 2. Typically the framerate is around 30fps. and 40 frames per second, the game runs slightly better on Xbox Series X, but without graphics you’re unlikely to notice the difference. But if some more demanding effects appear, the frame rate drops below the 30 frames per second limit.

But it’s even worse in densely populated areas where there are a lot of NPCs. The problem here is the same as in Baldur’s Gate 3, and the game is severely limited by CPU power (and bandwidth). Not only does this drop frame rates below 30fps on consoles, but it also causes quite a bit of stuttering and inconsistent time between frames.

If you thought you could avoid such problems on PC, you will be disappointed. Although it offers quite significant settings, including DLSS upscaling and FSR (no image generation), the requirements are really high. At native 4K you won’t be able to hit 60fps even on the RTX 4090, which doesn’t matter since you can use the aforementioned upscaling, but the GPU isn’t the only issue.

Once you reach the city, you’ll experience the same stuttering and framerate drops as on consoles. Thompson tested the game on a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and frame rates regularly dropped to 40fps. The situation probably won’t be much better for the most powerful gaming processor currently available, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. In short, Dragon’s Dogma 2 in this form is impossible to play at a stable 60 frames per second on modern hardware.

By the way, you won’t be able to play on the Steam Deck at all, where the FPS fluctuates within a few even at the lowest settings. The problem will likely be not only with the processor, but also with limited memory and its bandwidth.

Fortunately, Capcom is aware of the problems and promises to improve performance in the future. But when this will happen and whether the improvement will be sufficient remains to be seen.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 will be released on March 22. You can buy the game on Alza.cz.