Dragon’s Dogma 2 has seen its fair share of tweaks and improvements since launch, but none so drastic as the one afforded by PlayStation 5 Pro. On the one hand it utilises PS5 Pro’s PSSR upscaling to generate a cleaner, crisper picture – while on the other there’s a major performance boost over the base PS5. The bottom line: for those chasing a locked 60 frames per second experience, Pro now offers a way to do so. Sadly, and as with several other PS5 Pro patched games we’ve seen early on, Dragon’s Dogma 2’s use of PSSR has a few side effects. To be blunt, image quality suffers from extra break-up on fine elements – like grass – while the game’s ray traced global illumination also suffers from flickering and noise. So then, between all three graphics modes offered on PS5 Pro, which one ultimately gets us to the 60fps target – and which bears the fewest of these distractions?
Booting the game, PS5 Pro owners are greeted to a more fleshed out graphics menu. At the top, there’s a new mode added on Pro – the balanced mode – which sits in between the performance and graphics modes already present on base PS5. In side-by-side comparison, all three offer matching quality settings in terms of textures, shadows, and draw distance for foliage. However, the key difference is in each mode’s internal resolution target. Performance mode renders natively at 720p, balanced runs at 1080p, and finally the quality mode runs at a much higher 1440p. All are reconstructing to a 4K target using PSSR. Creating a convincing 4K image benefits from more pixels per frame – and so, the 720p performance mode does struggle to always resolve to a flicker-free, temporally stable result.
Returning to the menu, there are individual toggles for motion blur and the frame rate target. This latter option works just as on base PS5: there’s a 30fps cap, and a so-called ‘variable’ option – unlocking the frame-rate to either 60Hz or 120Hz depending on your display. The 30fps option is still not recommended on PS5 Pro, due to its issues with uneven frame-pacing resulting in choppy motion. It seems a waste of horsepower to lock at 30fps as well, given the console’s prospects at 60 frames per second are much improved. Rounding out, there is, once again, a ray tracing toggle in the menus, enabling RTGI. It has a huge impact to Dragon’s Dogma 2’s darkened areas, creating thicker shade and more realistic light bounce. On PS5 Pro, RTGI is enabled by default on balanced and graphics modes – but performance mode keeps it disabled. The curious twist here is that unlike base PS5, it’s possible to toggle ray tracing on and off on all modes (including the performance mode) giving you more scope to customise. I decided to keep all modes set to the out-of-the-box standards for today’s testing.
Many changes are made moving from the standard PS5 to the enhanced model, kicking off with revisions in resolution and upscaler. PS5 Pro’s graphics mode runs at a native 1440p with a PSSR upscale – a big change from the 4K checkerboard approach on the base PS5 equivalent mode. On paper, in rendering a 1920×2160 image, the base machine technically pushes more pixels per frame than PS5 Pro, but ultimately, PSSR’s benefits as an upscaler overcome that deficit. The result is Pro delivers a visibly crisper image overall with more definition resolved in distant trees and mountains during its opening flyover sequence. Also, swapping to the performance mode on each, it’s a similar story: PS5 Pro runs at 720p with a PSSR upscale, which is an even larger cutback in pixels pushed from the checkerboard 1536×1728 image on base PS5. Again, there’s a boost in sharpness and clarity with the PS5 Pro upscale via PSSR, even from a measly 720p base, but there are more consequences in image break-up.