Free Dragon's Dogma 2 mod hands RTX 40-series owners a much-needed performance bump

If you're struggling with low frame rates in Dragon's Dogma 2 and own an RTX 40-series graphics card, you might want to take a look at the latest work from modder PureDark. Known for adding DLSS and Frame Generation to Starfield, PureDark has turned their sights on getting Dragon's Dogma 2 up to speed. With the free mod over on PureDark's Patreon page, it's possible to switch on DLSS 3 and Frame Generation.

You should score yourself a nice little performance uplift with the Dragon's Dogma 2 DLSS3 Enabler 01 installed (via Videogamer). A handful of commenters suggest the mod is working well and massively improving performance on their systems, especially in towns, which are notoriously hard work to run for any PC. 

Though there is a chance the mod also causes your system to freeze. PureDark says: "People are reporting having crashes/freezes with FG, probably the reason it's hidden at launch. But still a lot of people reported having no issues at all after hours of playing, so try it and see whether you can use FG. If not you'll have to wait for the official patch to fix it."

One potential intermediary fix for the game freezing is to try to limit your fps to a more modest 90 or 60, which will still allow Frame Generation to work its magic and go above that figure.

Though some performance may still be stuck even with Frame Generation. Nick Evanson has been tirelessly testing Dragon's Dogma 2 over the past couple of weeks to understand its PC performance. He found that while a powerful graphics card is certainly a requirement for smoother gameplay, a system also requires a decent amount of processor power to handle the busier areas of the game well. A weak CPU holds any GPU back, and that's especially pronounced in Dragon's Dogma 2. If your frame rate is particularly low, even Frame Generation won't be able to function as well as it should.

Nick was also one of the first to note that the Frame Generation .dll files were already included in the original install for Dragon's Dogma 2, and that is the main reason for PureDark releasing this mod for free. "Since this mod only enables the game's own hidden DLSS3 implementation," they note on the download page, "it's now released for free." 

The modder's previous work, which has required a little more heavy lifting coding-wise, is generally kept behind their Patreon paywall.

Capcom, for its part, has acknowledged some of the issues around Dragon's Dogma 2 performance, particularly around its current DLSS implementation—which might be why Frame Generation wasn't enabled at launch. It notes in a dev update that: "Fixes are currently underway for an upcoming patch. In addition, we plan to add DLSS Frame Generation in a future title update." 

Though the current state of DLSS is a bit flaky in Capcom's latest, it's still worth a go, especially if you are struggling to hit an acceptable frame rate in-game. Though note that DLSS does add a degree of fuzziness to the game and likely requires further tweaks to really look as good as it should. You can take a look at some benchmarking footage of the game with the mod enabled and running native in this video from MXBenchmarkPC.