Dragon's Dogma 2 PS5 Pro 1
Image: Push Square

Touted as a game that could greatly benefit from the PS5 Pro's arrival, Dragon's Dogma 2 takes advantage of Sony's new system through several graphics settings that were recently added via an update.

Those familiar with Capcom's open world RPG will know that the title has struggled to attain smooth technical performance since its launch back in March. Although the developer has made significant improvements through numerous patches, the frame rate still has a habit of ducking and diving on the base PS5, regardless of your settings.

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With the PS5 Pro, then, the hope was that Dragon's Dogma 2 would finally be able to hit high frame rates without sacrificing image quality. However, we've been playing through the game again on the new console, and the results are disappointingly mixed.

First, the good news: Dragon's Dogma 2's frame rate is the best it's ever been, both out in the wilds and within its CPU-melting towns and cities. And thanks to the Pro, you don't have to tank the resolution in order to maintain those better frames; the title's new 'Balanced' graphical mode looks great and runs well, targeting 60 frames-per-second.

Enabling Ray Tracing doesn't seem to have any notable impact on things either, besides making the lighting look rather lovely. A win, for sure, in a game where environments can often appear picturesque.

And now the bad news: the frame rate still doesn't hit a consistent 60fps. Again, it is smoother than what you'll find on the base PS5 — as you'd expect! — but the underlying inconsistency remains. The near constant dips are easy to perceive if you're sensitive to such fluctuations.

Then there's the PSSR stuff, which could quite clearly be better implemented than it actually is. The display menu now has its own PSSR setting, spread across three options: Graphics, Balanced, and Performance. This lets you determine how much influence Sony's AI-driven upscaler has on the picture, and while it does seem to help Dragon's Dogma 2 maintain improved image quality overall, it also introduces some weird side effects.

Moving environmental assets like grass and waterfalls can end up looking shockingly blurred, like the tech doesn't quite know what it's meant to be rendering. These jarring abnormalities tend to get worse as you lower the PSSR settings. A fairly serious fumble as things stand.

The bottom line here is that on PS5 Pro, Dragon's Dogma 2 runs better than it ever has on the base PS5, and you get to customise your graphical settings to suit your needs. But at the same time, performance is still far from perfect, and PSSR throws up some dodgy image-related issues.

Hopefully, Capcom will continue making improvements to Dragon's Dogma 2 now that the Pro is here. Having said that, it's now more obvious than ever that the game is technically flawed on a fundamental level, when not even the raw power of Sony's new $700 system can smooth things out.

Will you be playing Dragon's Dogma 2 on PS5 Pro? How do you feel about technical issues still being present on Sony's new system? Go ahead and slay that dragon all over again in the comments section below.