Dragon's Dogma II Optimization & Known Fixes

This guide lists known issues and fixes in Dragon's Dogma II such as performance loss, as well as a streamlined guide to optimization and the best settings for a fluid experience.

Introduction

My goal is to make this guide as simple to follow and as accurate as possible, it's good to remember that we all make mistakes, even those who push to be perfect.

If this guide helped you it would be heavily appreciated if you liked, favorited or commented on it!

If you're feeling charitable feel free to give me some steam points ~ check below to learn how!

Optimized Quality Settings

Dragon's Dogma II is a very new game so these settings are subject to change and may not work for your setup specifically. Here I am aiming for graphics that will provide the best experience on any system that meets the specification requirements provided by Capcom. This section is based on community input and just testing on my own, the below settings are what I found to be the best. If you disagree please comment respectfully and let me know so I can test more!

Due to the nature of how new this game is some of this information is absolutely subject to change based on new updates, I will try my best to periodically update but I WILL miss things. Please leave me a comment if you know of a fix I missed, know a correction to one of my fixes or have some insight to provide on my settings.

Graphics Quality - Custom
Display Mode - Leave this on "Fullscreen" unless you have a reason to use Borderless
Screen Resolution - Personal preference
Frame Rate - I would leave this on "Variable"
V-Sync - My advice is to leave it on and if you notice screen tearing to turn it off
Dynamic Resolution - Off
FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 - If you have a GPU that doesn't support DLSS, play around with this. I personally have it off but I also have a beefy PC. IMO it doesn't look that bad turned up but quality degrades at Performance and higher
DLSS SUPER RESOLUTION - I do not have a Nvidia GPU so can't speak on this
Upscale Sharpness - I'd leave this be personally
Rendering Mode - If you're not using FSR I'd leave this on "Interlaced"
Image Quality - i would also leave this if you aren't using FSR
Ray Tracing - Off
Ambient Occlusion - SDFAO
Anti-Aliasing - TAA
Screen Space Reflections - On
Mesh Quality - Mid
Texture Filtering - High (ANISO x4)
Texture Quality - High (2 GB)
Grass/Tree Quality - High
Resource-Intense Effects Quality - High
Shadow Quality - Mid
Shadow Cache - On
Contact Shadows - On
Motion Blur - Personal preference
Bloom - Personal preference
Depth of Field - Personal preference
Lens Flare - Personal preference
Lens Distortion - Personal preference
Subsurface Scattering - On
Motion Quality - High

Community Performance Fixes

In this category I'll detail community performance fixes, i.e. fixes that the community has recommended that may or may not work.

Task Manager Fix

This fix actually worked for me personally so I'll list it first.

1. Right click your taskbar and click "Task Manager"
2. Click "Details" and right click DD2.exe
3. Set priority -> High

If you want the game to always stay in in "High" priority so you don't have to do this every single time you open the game you can use this mod[www.nexusmods.com].

Nvidia - Stutter Solution

I have not personally been able to test this since I am on AMD but the community seems to back it and some people say it has helped them.

1. Open Nvidia Control Panel
2. Click "Manage 3D Settings" and navigate to "Program Settings"
3. Find or add DD2. Open "Shader Cache Size"
4. Change the option to "Unlimited"

Note: some people found the option for Unlimited under Global Settings.

Nvidia - DLSS Upgrade

For some reason DD2 does not have the latest version of DLSS, if you are on a card that supports DLSS and want to use it use this, it could help alleviate performance issues.

1. For 40 Series Cards visit this download page[www.nexusmods.com]
1a. For any card under 40 Series visit this download page[www.nexusmods.com]
2. Click "Files" and then "Manual Download"
3. Extract the file using Winrar[www.win-rar.com] or 7-Zip[www.7-zip.org]
4. Drop the file into your install location
(normally C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Dragons Dogma 2)

AMD - Fluid Motion Frames

This may or may not work depending on your system, but we're here to get your game running well, so if you have an AMD card this is worth a try and has worked for some.

1. Open AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition. If you don't have it you can download it here[www.amd.com]
2. Click the "Gaming" tab and under "Games" click "Dragon's Dogma 2"
3. Enable "AMD Fluid Motion Frames"

Shader Cache Reset

One fix that seems to work for some is forcing the game to recompile the shaders

1. Close the game if it is open
2. Open your File Explorer
3. Navigate to your install location
(normally C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Dragons Dogma 2)
4. Delete the "shader.cache2" file
5. Open the game and let it install shaders

Crashing on Startup Solution

1. Open your File Explorer
2. Navigate to your install location
(normally C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Dragons Dogma 2)
3. Delete all DLC ".pak" files
4. (optional) Delete CrashReport.exe

Simple Solutions that may work

Going to list some simple solutions here on the off chance that they fix your issue, assuming the above solutions did not work for you.

1. Update your GPU Drivers and restart your PC.
2. Make sure it's not hardware related (eg. Heavy CPU Bottleneck)
3. Turn off DLSS. Right now apparently DLSS is causing problems. Try FSR.
4. Validate your game files on Steam.

Deleting Saves

For some reason currently Capcom did not add a way for you to delete a save and start over, I will detail a solution for this here.

Please be wary that there is a high risk of receiving a temporary ban for doing this. I am not responsible for anyone who does this and is punished, I am providing this for educational purposes and to help the very desperate few. Capcom is currently working on a new game function, so this section of the guide will be removed when it is inevitably added.

1. Go into your Steam library and right click "Dragon's Dogma 2"
2. Click "Properties" and under "General" turn off "Cloud Saves"
3. Open your file explorer and navigate to your userdata folder
(normally (x86)\Steam\userdata\(user id)\2054970\remote\win64_save
4. Delete "data000.bin" and "data00-1.bin"
4. Start the game and make a new character
5. Close the game and repeat Step 1 but this time instead of turning off cloud saves, you want to turn them on.
6. You will get a warning about a file conflict on the game page, click it and choose "Local File". This will overwrite the save file in the cloud and allow you to use it as a backup again.

This is no longer necessary as Capcom has patched in a new game feature, however on the off chance some poor soul needs this information I will leave it in the guide.

Closing Remarks

Donations would be greatly appreciated, thanks so much for reading my guide!!

https://ko-fi.com/nullas

If you have any questions regarding ANY of the above fixes or content please feel free to leave a comment below or add me on Steam and DM me. I also recommend checking out my other guides here to see if there are any guides for games you actively play or would like to play!

[mike_hawk]

the link to DD2 CPU Priority mod link is dead lol, seems like nexusmods deleted it for some reason?

[Skdursh]

FYI the DLSS links are dead.

[KaT]

Anyone find a fix for no floor load in?

[Spiele mit Lenkrad]

The game is designed around ray traced global illumination btw. This is strictly not for reflections, even the console versions use ray traced GI. Upside is when using ray traced GI all the ambient occlusion stuff turns redundant.

[Caféine]

currently, i'm trying to set shealthe button to X (on my xbox controller), and it says there is a duplicate because of the switching vocation skill. and i can't save my change because of that. any solution?

[John Doe]

"AFMF is recommended to be enabled while the game is running at minimum fps of 60." - 20.12.1 release note.

60 is the minimum fps AMD recommends when it first came out.

Safe to say is that the frames that got generated by FMF are taking samples from native frame rate. If there is any stutter happens in native (lower than 60), the end result just make stuttering more visible with the generated framerates.
i.e. FPS counter showing 90,120 or more, but with clear stuttering in visual.

[Lime]

Yeah Fluid Motion Frames seems to work very case-by-case basis, not sure what specifically makes it work for some users but apparently it does.

[John Doe]

Fluid Motion Frames actually made things worse with the fake framerates. One of the reasons is that FMF requires stable native 60fps to actually increase the smoothness of the motion, anything under that will actually increase the stutters.
So Aiming for stable native 60fps first before turning it on... which is very unlikely at this moment

Source: myself with 7900XTX & 7950X3D

[Dead_Pixels]

could add to this: i had major issues in the vocation skill menu: freezing, stutter, crashing.. increased my page file size and its FINE ! for whatever reason my page file was something like 2000-4000MB, i bumped it up to 8000-32000MB and i can actually buy multiple skills at once!

idk if windows managed page file or no page file would also work, but increasing it worked for me.

(i get confused reading about what page file is for vs RAM, some say windows managed is fine, some say no page file is fine if you have plenty of ram, i have 32GB ram for the record, but the game needed more page file for those skill previews i guess)

[DagdaKami]

Remote Play FPS Fix: Switch game from Fullscreen to Windowed.
I went from 12 FPS in city to solid 60FPS.