Dragon's Dogma 2 players struggling with frame rates - seemingly pretty much everyone - can pep up their FPS courtesy of a freshly launched unofficial mod that implements DLSS frame generation for those with NVIDIA's Lovelace graphics cards.
This is from well-known modder PureDark, who has previously brought DLSS 3 to the likes of Starfield, Elden Ring, and another high-profile PC games.
While Dragon's Dogma 2 has witnessed some considerable critical acclaim as a game, the performance issues have led to a seriously mixed bag of reviews on Steam. Frame rates can plummet to unplayable levels in towns, even bringing the mightiest GPUs to their knees and that includes NVIDIA's RTX 4090.
At any rate, that graphics card, and other RTX 4000 models, will do better with this new frame generation mod that Videogamer pointed out - you can grab it on PureDark's Patreon.
The good news is that it's free, too, unlike some of PureDark's previous unofficial DLSS patches. As the modder explains, this is because the amount of work involved wasn't such a big deal, as the mod just enables the hidden DLSS3 implementation already in Dragon's Dogma 2.
While it might be free, there are caveats as the modder makes clear. PureDark tells us:
"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."
So, your mileage may vary, and of course, frame generation isn't exactly a panacea for frame rate issues - with lower FPS the tech struggles to make an impact, and it's better at speeding up frame rates which are already at a decent level.
The modder does also note that some PC gamers have had more success with this DLSS 3 hack by capping the frame rate. PureDark suggests capping at 90 FPS in the NVIDIA Control Panel, or capping at 60 FPS in-game (which with frame generation is actually 120 FPS, so pretty fluid).
As previously observed, part of the problem with Dragon's Dogma 2 is that it's hard work for the CPU in busy areas like cities. As a result, in some cases the processor is bottlenecking even the most powerful GPU, giving a lot of PCs some serious trouble in running the game smoothly.
Capcom is working on frame generation itself, of course, with the groundwork already in the game as noted. Hopefully this official version will arrive before long to help those mired in frame rate hell. Doubtless it can't come soon enough for the folks in this boat with an RTX 4000 graphics card churning away thanks to CPU bottlenecking.
Read more: NVIDIA's RTX 5000 GPUs on track for Q4 2024 launch but don't expect a Lovelace performance leap