Dragon's Dogma 2: Why Exactly Is It So CPU Intensive?
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 11 апр 2024
- ► Watch the FULL video here: • DF Direct Weekly #157:...
► Support us on Patreon! bit.ly/3jEGjvx
► Digital Foundry RUclips: / digitalfoundry
► Digital Foundry Merch: store.digitalfoundry.net
► Digital Foundry at Eurogamer: eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry
► Follow on Twitter: / digitalfoundry
Generally speaking, there's two ways to make NPCs in games:
- The classic approach, where every NPC is its own actor with their own AI tree, own skeletal mesh, own CPU based animation controller and their own physical simulation, most of which is running on a single thread, or at least, sharing the same thread with all other NPCs for the respective system. The vast majority of games still use this approach, because it's simple to implement and very flexible, meaning it's easier to make NPCs as complex as they need to be. Downside is it doesn't scale very well, and it's gotten worse compared to older games since the increased complexity of NPCs has far outstripped any performance gains from modern hardware, particularly on the CPU side of things.
- The other approach is a dedicated mob system, that heavily relies on mesh and animation instancing (where multiple NPCs reuse the same mesh and animation computations), compute shaders/vertex animations (meaning animations are done on the GPU instead of the CPU) and things like Entity Component Systems, which try to aggressively optimize memory layouts and allow for high levels of parallelization. Downside is that those systems are exponentially more complex and oftentimes quite limiting, which usually means that your NPCs will end up having to be much simpler in terms of visual fidelity and behavior.
Most, if not all games that feature a large quantity of NPCs (think Witcher 3, Assassins Creed, Cyberpunk, Hogwarts Legacy) tend to feature both. Where "hero NPCs" like enemies or companions are done using the classic approach to allow for complex interactions like combat n such, and all the background actors are filled in via the mob system and are much less interactive/complex. It would appear to me that DD2/RE:Engine doesn't feature such a system or they didn't want to use one for some reason and were probably hoping they could just get away with it. Usually such decisions have to be made pretty early, so guess by the time they realized things weren't working out it was too late budget/timeline wise to change course.
Then the game is bad because of bad management.
If you're given a puzzle, and you come out with a full cooked meal.
We gonna need to ask where we got the extra stuff from....and the manager is the one to blame.
They said: "Here's the project, here's the budget and timeline, don't tell me it can't be done"
That's literally everything ever made inside a company only in it for money.
Remember people who started in their garages?
They wanted to provide a service, or product, they gave it their all, sacrificed much to sink everything into their work, and thats why it's good, they then become a huge successful company only to loose sight of why they became successful...
It was providing something... a good game, a product, etc...
Now that its a company, it's about the bottom line and keeping the company running and employees paid for the next 100 years...
And quality is now suffering because of that.
@@RSAgility lol, food analogies.
Thanks for the input mr. expert, way to add nothing to the conversation.
@@fWfwwaw And isn't he wrong? Managers aren't domain experts. Bad managers will restrict their employees and won't listen to feedback. I am a software developer, and that was the case in many companies I worked for. I have seen fanboys in Capcom Steam forum defending the company "because it's Capcom", "don't listen to the haters".
Capcom, meanwhile, made a number of bad decisions. First, targeting 30 fps, which you san see when you read their system requirements on Steam page. The minimum and recommended requirements are laughable, btw. They have nothing to do with real ones. Second mistake was focusing on microtransactions WHILE having a very bad performance. This ticks off people, and very right so. It just shows the company's priorities. Single player, design wrapped around MTX (changes to curatives from first game forcing camping for example, where you have paid camping items that are better than generic ones and unlock at vendors).
That's not the fault of the developers.
@@azradun3903 Bad managers are bad, water is wet, and both have NOTHING to do with the discussion at hand.
The thing is, OP made a huge ass post explaining two ways of handling character AI to then take an educated guess at where the issue may lie, just for the jokester over there to come in and say 'manager bad, here's food as an example'.
You see, the original DD was an extremely weird, niche game, that was basically a pet project of the producer. At launch it ran horribly, had some very questionable design choices and a bunch of systems that either stuck a magnificent landing or crashed and burned horrendously. Somehow, despite all this, it became such a cult classic that we got a sequel.
If you actually play DD2, one thing that becomes apparent is that they focused on some very specific aspects of the game to the detriment of everything else. In the goddamn video that I'm pretty sure both of you just didn't watch, DF themselves say that the game displays competence in many of its aspects. So the faulty parts could be related to time constraints, budget constraints, development issues, etc.
So yeah, to just discard the logic behind this decision-making process and say 'lol manager bad' is just outright stupid and, like I said, adds nothing to the conversation.
Create a very good character creator tool... Give the 100% editor quality to each NPC. Enjoy frames.
There's no reason at all to excuse the lag with "they're pretty clever" cos they're fucking not. Bad optimized to push out the game.
Back in 2016 leaks were already talking about game not being able to keep a stable frame. Not being able to have 2 bosses at once on screen, Glad we didn't get this version.
The NPC pop-in is something I noticed in another RE Engine game: Street Fighter 6's World Tour mode. While not as severe as DD2's, I do think it hints that RE Engine's weakpoint is continuous AI.
the engine is amazing, apart from the cpu instructioning lol. probably why they are making a new one.
This will affect Monster Hunter Wilds. Capcom better make the human NPCs static like other open-world RPGs.
It’s being pushed beyond its original capabilities, it’s why they are making a newer version to fix all those issue.
Yeah SF6 World Tour was also pretty demanding on CPU i believe. Really hope they can step it up with MH Wilds.
Pop in so egregious that it is likely intentional! Just like the first game lol
as a Stellaris Player, i found it VERY FUNNY that, once people found out the perfornance issiues were caused by NPCs, they came up with the same solution we did.
If you fight a dragon in a city with >10 npcs/pawns, there is barely any difference in framerate in comparison to normal on pc. So I'd guess their idle AI is pretty much as expensive to run as their combat AI, which is weird.
There's a quest with a castle coming from under the sea and it's empty (not a single npc) but you get very low fps when you go there. Maybe the game have very complex geometry)
Yeah, their engine seems to not have any technique to handle that. For example in Kingmaker you have thousands of NPCs on the battlefield, and when you get close or interact with them, then they seamlessly switch to a very detailed model, featuring complex behavior and interactions, but that is just for a couple dozen of them at most. Here you have NPCs that look pretty basic, probably can do a lot of intricate stuff, but 99.9% of the time that they just idle, which is a gigantic waste of computing capacity. For Kingmaker developers I think it took years to develop, so DD2 is probably never gonna have any significant improvements.
AI has nothing to do with the lag. That's the exuse they gave, but capcom gave them a shitty engine not made for big open worlds. 1/5 of mannpower and still they managed to make a fun game. Clearly sabotaged.
The issue it's the model quality being the same as you and your pawns for EACH single NPC.
@@saveborg1091 good explanation)
I was surprised by that aswell. Whole time i was thinking „man performance really sucks here but as long as I won’t be fighting I should be fine and my pc shouldn’t start a fire“ but when I first fought a troll I think in the city with like 10 guards and all my pawns between the shops it didn’t drop frames at all.
I don’t think performance issues of DD2 will ever be fixed. It needs a whole overhaul. They might have to change several decisions that they took in the planning phase of sdlc.
Since Capcom has already made their money, and a lot of consumer base is defending any sort of criticism, I highly doubt this game will be fixed the way Cyberpunk or No man’s sky got patched.
It does not need an overhaul, performance-wise. Capcom just needs to prune city NPC count (already proven effective thanks to Dragonsplague lmao).
@@Aggrofool Having an empty city isn’t a fix
They would have to drop the resolution to like 1080p in order to hit 60fps, thats the simple solution lower the resolution and framerate will increase
@@randyrrs7028 I can set my resolution to 720p and my 4090 + 7800X3D setup still drops to 40 fps sometimes in the towns. That´s a CPU Bottleneck. A lower resolution doesn´t help at all with the issues this game has. At least not in the town.
Yeah it needs a overhaul It really doesn't matter what resolution I set it to runs like shit so many things just make it run like shit.
It really is weird that you can look at a lot of 2014-2018 games and see how much is going on onscreen, compared to now, it's barely changed, in many cases it's gone backwards, but somehow games require a lot more CPU, Ram and GPU horsepower to run at a lesser level
Its a shame, because we were getting to the point on ps4 where 60fps was becoming standard, and stuff like checkerboarding and dynamic res were solving so many issues. Now this gen we’ve mobed over to these shitty stuttery engines and everything feels like its holding on by a thread like in the 360 era
It's likely that a lot of "faking" was used to achieve some of the effects desired in older games whereas now devs can simulate / render things at full clarity without faking it, but you may not necessarily notice the difference between say, good baked lighting and RT, so a lot of newer games seem underwhelming in comparison. I think we've already reached a fairly high level of graphical fidelity so to increasing it any further would require much for effort for a small improvement, and AAA devs are already stresses out as is.
Doesn't justify stuttery, buggy, games which don't scale properly with hardware. (although not every 2023 release would fall here imo)
It just doesn't make good use of your systems resources. Lower end rigs will never go over 40% CPU/65% GPU usage yet its at 15fps
yup, thing is big companies prioritise profit over anything else, so they use these technologies to release products faster instead of better.
I just hope we find an acceptable balance between visual quality and performance again, because this is ridiculous
When we see massive cities in older games packed with npcs like in The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077 and the Assassin's Creed games, it really makes us question why the cities in modern games are so much more cpu heavy without being nearly as much crowded.
As Richard pointed out, it's because of the emergent gameplay stuff. This is the only game where literally every NPC has a name and can be interacted with be it verbally or physically. Hell you can even build affinity with them by giving them gifts.
Those games probably have less than half of the depth involved in modern game cities.
@@zedetach They really showed their lack of knowledge here. You dont interact with all of them at the same time, only few at the time so there is no reason at all that that should hinder performance at all. This really is bad code.
Witcher 3's npcs do nothing, same as Assassin's Creed's.
@@outlander234 except your wrong. The NPCs in the games the comment listed do not do anything at all. The NPCs in DD2 are interacting with each other and the player 24/7. They all literally have jobs and schedules and real lives they live out.
Plot twist: the NPC logic was coded by YandereDev.
lol I've been making that joke too. I just think of those videos talking about how he coded something like every NPC has to check their entire schedule on every frame.
else if
else if
else if
else if
else if
The NPCs aren't fantastic enough to warrant the performance cost. Like the defenders of this game need to admit this somehow.
The NPCs in Fable 3 were very impressive and that's on Xbox 360. I can only come away with the opinion that the Dragon's Dogma 2 dev teams just didn't do a very good job in this particular aspect of their game.
The problem with DD2 is that it is not completely finished, Capcom released it much ahead of time to close its fiscal year that just ends in March of this year, there are many aspects that tell you the rush they put on it during its development, DD2 needed at least one to two years of development to optimize, polish and realize the real vision of its potential.
They aimed for the OG Dragons Dogma experience :D They will probably release a Addon again that will fix alot of this, like Dark Arisen did.
@@MrCrypto137Yeah but the base game is arguably worse. I’m sure a Dark Arisen expansion will help but the base game was underwhelming even compared to the original DD.
@@NotCharAznable No i don't think so. The base game is much better with DD2. Or what do you think is better in DD1 basegame?
@@NotCharAznable The original DD had even worse performance issues before Dark Arisen came out.
Other than the performance problem in city the game is phenomenal and its reviews have been overwhelmingly positive after the initial review bombing and people have already clocked 100s of hours in the game
I love how 10 roaming NPCs in DD2 demand more compute than 500 NPCs individually fighting in Bannerlord while taking orders.
When you forget next gen games require next gen hardware… as they say ignorance is bliss.
“why is performance in this game so bad with my console that has 6 year old PC hardware!?!?!!”
DD2 doesn’t run well on anything asides AMDs $9,000 Threadripper 7995WX bub.
@@known3617And what do these NPCs have of "next gen"?
You can't simply say "next gen" and it will make it heavier lol
The explained it in the video: the purpose of the engine counts. It's kinda like when EA decided that frostbite would be in every game they published, went from battlefield to Dragon Age and FIFA. Dragon Age in particular had struggles in development due to the Frostbite not having from the box features that are fundamental for a third person rpg development.
@@known3617 Next gen indicates a jump in quality in one way or another, if there is no jump in quality the next gen hardware requirements are not justified.
It's embarrassing, Assassin's Creed ONE figured out how to do interactable crowd AI literally 2 decades ago on ancient hardware, when DD2 has arguably worse crowds in terms of the sheer number of NPCs on screen and their interactivity with the player. Imho it's just quite frankly inexcusable.
Gotta love the Running Man in the background
It`s easy to be a PC gamer nowadays, wait 3-4 years after the release and get them cheap or free 99% bugfixed.
FOMO is a real issue, lots of good games out there to play while companies fix their unoptmized AAA games on release
Or not. Suicide squad is already at 50% off lol.
you basically just sold someone a PS5 lol
it's an issue on consoles too. did you not watch the video?
@@Kougeru Difference, I think, with PC is that you can brute force some issues with proper hardware. Consoles will be "stuck" in 30 fps and no amount of patching will suddenly make it run 60 fps
I knew this game was cool when I was fighting an ogre on a top hill and when I fell off the cliff, one of my pawns actually caught me in their hands to keep me from fall damage. I was impressed with that mechanic. This game actually has some smart ass AI/simulation.
That's one persistent event the npcs do
@@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo lol i never seen it after playing 20hrs
@@jbway86 capcom game engine
@@jbway86 try fall off a flying creature or a high building
What did ur pawn fall off first? How he get down there lol
It's just the engine wasn't prep for open world. They just decided to do a trial and error with DD2. Then by the time other games come out they would have work out all the kinks.
If this is an issue in Dragon’s Dogma 2, what is it going to be like in Monster Hunter Wilds? THAT’S what worries me.
if the issue is tied to the NPC's as capcom stated this shouldnt really be an issue in MHW because the monster hunter formula is you + your buddy(ies) bonking a monster or two. Thats far fewer actors than a cities worth of dudes. Their NPC's are static in all of the games that i have seen, even in rise when they were "summonable" in the base game they didnt move.
@@relishcakes4525 I believe the guy is referring to the stampede and probably other similar mechanics that was shown off for Wilds. If that kind of stuff is a focus, it is a bit of a cause for concern. But anyway I suspect DD2 was rushed to spare more resources for Wilds so it probably won't be a big issue even if that was ultimately a bad idea.
IDK if they uses the same Re engine, but clearly capcom sabotaged DD2 giving an outdated non adaptable engine for an open world wich demanded high quality. Gave them 1/5 of mannpower, not enough money and this is what happened. Still, made great sales and they managed to create an insane fun game... not as the first one tho. but i understand the difficulties.
@@relishcakes4525shouldn’t be much of an issue, world has an insane amount of endemic life as well as small monsters and it runs just fine. Wilds should more or less be the same with the game rendering only what’s necessary
@@jarredwilliams7948Monster Hunter World wasn't created using the RE Engine though.
In most games NPCs have a set of strict binding game rules that limits what they can do. This includes a set of simple dialogue, world space and character collision map, and walking animation tied to a set path and radius ( assuming they move at all, many times they are fixed in place ).
In DD2 nearly all NPC have essentially an open script, meaning they can walk around wherever they want no matter how far they are from the player character. On top of that they are free to engage in a battle that is completely unaided by the character, this alone is a hugely chaotic and requires an enormous amount of CPU processing to achieve in real time. The code is not perfect in DD2, no code is, that being said optimizing will get you little in CPU performance gains. The system itself is just that demanding like it or not.
I have tested DD2 cpu utilization on the latest intel i9-14900KS and it was totally bottlenecked in cities, memory bandwidth isn’t enough for this game. I re tested it with AMDs ThreadRipper Pro 7995 WX and even that monster of a CPU was 83% utilized with the memory bandwidth just barely being enough.
TLDR: DD2 is the next Crysis for CPUs.
If an NPC falls in the woods and no player is around to see it, does it matter? There's nothing in the presentation of the game that's conducive to this allegedly deep simulation. Nobody talks about what happened to so-and-so on their way to the market. If they did that using decent text-to-speech I'd love it. Like if this was 3d Dwarf Fortress. But it's not like that. The sacrifices they made in the performance and presentation of the game just aren't worth it just so the player can give gifts to every single meaningless NPC who only has three lines of dialogue. "What?" "Yeah?" and "Tell me about your adventures."
@@SamuelCatsyexactly
It's like having to watch a very sloppy opera performance, criticizing it, and being told not to because it had a wonderful backstage crew of staff that does everything perfectly.
Like yeah, it's cool, but what we can SEE and EXPERIENCE is shit, so does all that really matter?
or just poorly coded.
There was a very old game called Wizardry 7. A tile based dungeon crawler. What made it unique was that other parties and factions actually walked over the map and tried to get the clues for the big McGuffin before you did. And they fought each other, so at some point, some key NPCs could be just dead, without any player input. And if they got to a key item, you had to track them yourself and grab it from them. Game relased in 1992 and no, I never finished it. I remember having it on a floppy disk.
Oh, and that game had more meaningful conversations as well, as you could input key words yourself. I once tried to tell a wizard "f... you". The reply was "Same to you!".
Oh, and there is Stellaris. Ever since they added jobs, the game calculates job preferences and actions for every population unit of the galaxy. Each game month (30 seconds). Late game can get into 1000s of pops across whole galaxy that all have their own preferences (no you cannot manually assign them to jobs). Late game always had some lags, but comparing several thousands of entitites making their own decisions, on top of all AI fleets, AI-managed planets and simulated economy, all in real time, yeah.
I think the fact that each npc is unique makes it harder for the CPU to handle their render compared to other open world games where models can be reused like templates. In dd2, each npc has a unique face, name, locale and status (alive or dead),and the game has to be able to load the proper character at the proper place at all time. It has to keep track of each npc even if you are on the other side of the map. I can easily imagine how this system can represent a heavy calculation load.
I haven't played the game yet, but how is this different from NPCs in RDR2? That game had the best NPCs I've ever seen, and ran perfectly on last gen!
@@falmannaI'm guessing in a general sense, RDR2 had only a few unique NPCs per location while the rest were just generated from a pool of random models. It also likely didn't keep track of these NPCs as much when they're off screen.
That being said, DD2 doesn't really do anything that unique despite having the supposedly 1000 unique NPCs regardless. Sure they all have unique models, names etc. but only a few of them are actually used for quests. Heck, most of them even spit out generic responses anyway so they might as well have been randomly generated. The only really unique thing it does is the affinity system but even that doesn't really lead anywhere. Sure they appear once in a cutscene towards the end and that's it.
In the end, I'm inclined to believe the claims that the game was released prematurely. I love the game and still play it daily after 200 hours but it's pretty clear where some mechanics or content were cut or not fully fleshed out. Hopefully they'll continue with content patches alongside performance patches.
DD2 needs a DDDA treatment.
The X space sim series on PC has hundreds of not thousands of ships and space stations that need to be tracked down in real time both in and out of sector where the player is in.
This isn't new to this game.😊
Agreed, dd2 doesn't do much with all these unique npc. Not sure it was necessary.
But while the comparison with rdr2 can be made as both game have an ambitious open world, I don't think it's fair. Rockstar games have a budget and dev team far bigger than what Capcom can afford. The level of polish we see in Rdr2 (and probably in gtavi) is heavily financed by gtav online micro transactions, game sales alone are not enough. Capcom doesn't rely on micro transactions as much as Rockstar does, limiting the scope of what features and systems they can implement.
I think it's a shame Capcom is criticized so much for adding mtx in dd2, and have their game be compared all the while to other open world produced by publishers who rely heavily on them.
Oblivion did all that,
The Assassin's Creed game engine AnvilNext has a superior asset management system is the reason for why there can be so many NPC's without tanking frame rate. Most other game engines are graphics engines used as game engines.
But AC NPCs are jist blank window dressing. DD2'S NPCs can actually be interacted with
Also Ubisoft mostly makes Open World games. Dragon Dogma2 has the exact problem that MT framework did in the original game. Where Capcom struggle make the game perform well Open World.
@@gothpunkboy89 I haven't played DD2. The only AC I've played is Odyssey, Origins, Valhalla in that order. One thing this game engine does that no other game engine I've seen is dead bodies don't vanish. Other game engines vanish dead bodies to stay under some polygon/asset budget so frame-rate don't tank. With AC I can move and pile up body count and frame-rate don't suffer. I've posted a few RUclips's to that affect.
@@0x8badbeef Bodies do despawn in AC games. They just take longer then some games.
@@gothpunkboy89 I stood there for hours and they are still there. I hid one in the bush and came back and it was there. There was an occasion a body was missing. So I ran a test. I stood a long distance to see if it vanishes. But guess what? A soldier came along and picked it up and carried it away. I followed the soldier and he tossed it off a cliff. Another thing is, after speaking to an NPC they leave. I followed one to the end of the map then they eventually stopped moving. They do not vanish. These devs seem to go to extreme lengths. Another is after sinking a ship you would think it would vanish. No. I started swimming to the bottom. Eventually everything turned black. But I kept swimming. Then I saw a mast. Then I picked up some loot. I can write an essay on things I've done that is not possible in other games.
So what kind of CPU do you need to run Dragon Dogma 2 then?
I feel like its just the re engine it was always used for Resident evil games which arent open world but this game is open world so I think its an engine issue
its gotta be the weird grasshoppers jumping around when i run around in the sand.
Hmm i believe the engine it self has always had trouble, when redering long range stuff... The way the engine has always had 1/4 rate animations and how stuff has always move when things are far away DD2 is so much bigger highlights the troubles they began having on RE8.
It seems like they simulate all NPCs at full detail at all times (while they're on screen). There are numerous LoD techniques they can use to simplify creature pathing and ai
I have a computer that is far beyond the recommended specs for DD2. The frame drops arent AWFUL for me but still noticeable. I was thinking its got something to do with how open everything is. Its in the RE engine, previous games generally had closed off levels with few NPC's at a time and much slower game play so this sort of issue probably wasnt thought of in design, and by the time it popped up it was probably already too late. I'm interested to see if they ever figure out a way to fix it officially.
You also have to keep in mind how dialog heavy and character depth rich the npcs are. The vivid awe inspiring conversations you can have with so many of them. 😂 I don't think you have a single back and forth conversation with anyone in this game.
I got my doubts on A.I. being the issue. What is more likely is the CPU is doing graphics work before passing it on to the GPU.
This kind of processing is very normal on lesser optimized engines, especially those from years past.
Yeah, maybe but performance is not as bad during forests and less populated areas.
@@004vamsi Still quite bad, Compared to every other game though.
Are you guys forgetting that RE Engine games have always had quarter framerate animations for enemies only like 15-20 ft from you, even on a high-end PC. CPU optimization is the very last thing I expect from a proprietary game engine owned by a Japanese company. At this point I don't expect it from any engine used by any dev, open world game or otherwise.
Japanese devs are hit and miss with performance and optimisation.
@@mitchjames9350With the exception of Nintendo's 1st parties. The Switch's CPU is extremely bad, but the fact that can handle the 8 player mod of Smash Bros with that absurd AI is a huge accomplishment.
In fact, when the game launched, people complained that the bots were far too good and destroyed PRO players.
It's extremely CPU intensive as well, with my i7-12700K, i have one thread peaked at 100% for complex 8 player matches on the emulator and produces perfect 60fps locked, flat frametime/gpu busy without any drop.
The fact that reviewers gave this game 9/10 and 10/10 is another example of how discredited game journalism is...
Technical issues aside, it's an incredibly fun game to play.
@@wiremesh2 9 means near perfect, 10 is perfect. DD2 is NOWHERE close to perfect. It has a lot of nice gimmicks but also a lot of completely sh*t stuff. Like I had my pawn kick goblin of the cliff, it almost died so 2 of my pawns jumped to their death to kill it. Or from game where devs say we have limited fast travel because only boring games need it I expect more than the same 3 types of mobs attacking me every 30 seconds or so it seems. And on top of it if you make me fight the same goblins milionth time how about you give them more attack patterns? This game is probably 7.5 in state it is now, and 8.5 maybe 9 when they actually fix technical side.
@@korinogaro IMO, number scores are awful. I hate reviews that use them. It's all subjective. Certain things that annoy some players others won't even mind. I much prefer reviews that show a comprehensive breakdown of pluses and minuses so I can weigh what I personally value. There's no such thing as a perfect game for all players.
I agree the issues you listed are negative, but some players will have a higher tolerance for it (myself included). So as much as I think scores are dumb, I'm not surprised some people would give it a 10 if it gels with them that well. By the same token, I'm sure plenty of people hate the game outright.
@@wiremesh2 I am more annoyed how many reviewers gave it that much. Because lets not pretend, both DD1 and 2 are the type of game where majority is split between hating it and loving it. And middle ground has really small population. Yet somehow almost everyone is hyping this game. Like this is simply improbable. I am not suggesting some cash bags changed hands but it is most likely "I want to belong to cool kids and I think cool kids would like this game". I kinda gree with you on number scores but only due to these scores losing meaning in last ~20-25 years. Like if something was functioning and kinda fun to play it used to get 5/10. 7/10 was already a good game. Like AC:Valhalla would be 7/10 game. Everything works, plays nice but it is nothing to write home about. 9/10 games were system sellers. And now it seems 7-7.5/10 was upgraded to 9/10. BTW. not joking about it. If we had journalism standards from 25 years ago: TLoU part 1 on PC would get 4-5/10 simply for how shit it's performance on PC was and how glitchy it was. Good old days :(
@@korinogaro You got me curious. I hadn't checked reviews, but I glanced at Metacritic. It's sitting at 85 overall there. 8 critic reviews are at 100, which I agree is a little silly. Dark Arisen only got a single 100 review for the PC version.
Got to love The Running Man out of focus in the background.
There's something reassuring in knowing that even as my vision gets worse, I'll always recognize Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, and Maria Conchita Alonzo.
I seen a video where the guy went pure evil and the NPCs did not care. At all. What's left?
Yo is that The Running Man?
I'm on Xbox Series X, I haven't had any pop ins at all. Only thing I noticed which happened only once, is when I finished a fight with goblins, more spawned on top of a cliff.
I'm liking the fuller beard, John.
Cringe
Can't you build reputation with every npc or something like that? Also, they are simulated and can die on the other side of the world while you are somewhere else doing your own thing. The npcs probably are way more complicated than they need to be.
RE Engine has been such a great tool for developers at Capcom! It has brought some of the best looking and performing games in the industry these last 5 years, but I wish they keep improving it because things as reduced frame rate on distant NPCs (RE2 and 3 Remakes), poor or bugged anti aliasing, weak/lackluster/unimpressive ray tracing implementations, extremely low res and ugly/buggy reflections, and now the NPC count/pop in and low FPS (which is really a first, since the vast majority of games have ran flawlessly) are all weak points that, *if fixed* or vastly improved, would take the engine to the next level!
Crazy how the game has been out for three weeks now and there has been NO performance patches.
Performance and optimization is what devs spend a large chunk of the development cycle on.
DD2 was released prematurely. Almost a year before its actually ready
Modders have released some mods to help. CPU utilization bat file and DLSS3 enabler.
@@Bairyhalls47 "almost a year?" that is rather specific. whats the source? or are you talking out of your a**?
@@tiguilherman_plays “wHerE’ sOUrCe?” Shut up Nerd
But Itsuno said this was his vision of Dragon’s Dogma 😎
Am I the only one that noticed The Running Man in John’s background? 😆
People are looking at an simulation standpoint, I have another theory why they are so CPU heavy: Drawcalls. I may be wrong but every NPC, even not paws seems to be using a similar customization system than the MC(most non-unique character seems to be drawing from the same customization options as MC). That means if the main character have 20 Drawncalls(I imagine it use multiple textures for the body, a single material for every piece of armor and 2 materials for every tattoo part and those for the meshes) every NPC is using the same thing. Monsters wouldn't use this so that's why you don't see it in the world.
But to be clear: this is just a theory, a gamedev theory. Also, I know that what I talked about previously can be optimized, but did capcom do it? If they were focusing on 30 fps, maybe not.
Yeah I mean every NPC is a fully interactable item that you can pick up and throw, plus all the other things they need to be able to do
Skyrim has a similar problem to DD2 when you add in a lot of NPC's with mods because they are interactable and like dd2 they cause FPS drops. However, you can use the FSR 3 frame generation mod to smooth out FPS and it REALLY makes a difference. I literally run the game at 30fps and frame generation doubles my fps. Game feels smooth even with lots of NPC's on screen. FSR 3 fg will likely be the only way you can solve the problem on consoles in DD2.
I reckon it‘s the same situation BioWare had with ME, when they were forced to use the Frostbite engine.
The NPC pop in is because of the complex culling algorithm in this game. You can actually solve this issue by using a Mod called "No NPC No Enemy", the mod actually reduces the minimum and default NPC count which is 30 and is very low for this kind of game. But instead, you should increase it to over a 100 and you wont have this persistent problem of NPC pop in. It barely impacts the CPU performance at that point, atleast in higher end CPUs.
There are also other settings you can mess around with in the config ini file. It can range from the parallelprocessorcount, asyncloadtimes, memory allocation, mesh shaders etc, which can help u with reducing the frequency of dips at the very least.
The way NPCs fade in reminds me of playing Shenmue 2 on the Dreamcast, WTF?
As much as I believe that releasing the PC port at $70 in such a state is not acceptable, I have to say that DD NPCs definitely have more physicality (when they're not popping out of the aether in the city. Yes, there are plenty of games (like Cyberpunk and AC) that can render multitude of NPCs, but in those cases they have very limited behaviors and the AI acts as a swarm. It's also reactive as opposed to proactive. NPCs in "crowd" scenarios clip into objects or another, you just don't linger on it as much because there is so much happening. Each pawn has to be a prospective party member. Hopefully they can find a way to maintain the substance while increasing performance. For a single player PC game on midrange hardware, 60 should be the target.
because it was rushed and they did not know what they were doing
to Rich's point at the end - that isnt really the problem though. the 'emergent gamplay' that is exciting in dragons dogma 2 isnt whats causing framerates to suffer. that all happens (relatively) fine. its in the static streets of a city, with zero 'emergent gameplay' that is tanking the framerate, so we cant blame any of the performance issues on that. its just litteraly poorly made, because not enough time or resources were given to finding optimisations and fixes for these cpu issues.
From GPU standpoint, the game is actually really well optimized the game is gorgeous and ray tracing barely touches your framerate, shame you need a 256 core 40 Thz cpu
why is't so hard to make a 30 fps cap?
You just know john would tell you he has the best headphones in the world.
While bad use of resources might also still be at play, we should remember that, for a game to be 4K60, it most likely need not to use the resources as intensively as one would expect of an actual next-gen (current gen, PS5/XSX) game. It's easy for PS4/One games to get to 4K60 in the successors, but because they're just having the extra resources thrown at having the game run faster.
It's as if someone made a game so ambitious and resource-intensive that it was targeted to the RTX4090 and people started nagging because it wasn't 4K60 or more - if the others (4080) can't even run it, you shouldn't expect it to also have spare resources to go beyond in that.
Again, just talking about newer games trying to squeeze all that is there to have on PS5/XSX. If someone misuses resources, that's something else - however, DF might be able to see a glimpse, so us uninitiated shouldn't even be able to grasp it.
They would have to drop the resolution to like 1080p in order to hit 60fps, thats the simple solution lower the resolution and framerate will increase
The problem is that they don't fully understand how to make the game perform well. They managed to get the game working and to them that was "good enough."
Yeah they should just up the system requirements if they can't fix it and refund people who don't meet the new ones yup good enough for them...it runs kinda good enough I agree they don't understand.
Gameplay & exploring 9/10 / CPU Optemizations 3/10 / Pop in NPCs in player face 1/10
And about BS of "NPCs react to player & monsters..etc" Skyrim from 2011 had similar thing with NPCs attacking monsters & enemies inside Cities
Stop defending those broken Triple-AAA games while they costs $70 ($80 with Tax) lol
Even as DD fan since PS3 era, which run like 20 fps(badoptimizations), there is no excuse to make DD2 run 45 fps on Ryzen 7950x inside the city Lol
You know what other game did something similar in terms of world interaction and physicality last year? Tears of the Kingdom. On the fucking Switch.
I see John forgot to turn off his workout video 😂
Nah AI isn't the reason. RDR2 didn't have this issue and it's NPCs and general world detail are great. I think this is just a serious example of bad optimization and what it can do. CPUs are better than ever yet performance is getting worse.
If I had to guess they aren't properly splitting tasks between GPU and CPU. I bet if they take away more of the load to the GPU, it would help tremendously.
RDR2 is a completely different engine! You're talking about an engine that is built upon large open worlds with lots of AI and NPCs all over the place (Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto)! RE Engine is obviously not designed for this at all. I don't think anything other than band-aids are going to somewhat resolve this issue. You can polish a turd but it's still a turd.
@@txmetalcobra engine is a part of the development kit. It’s just a library of function that helps the designers build their game without having worry about things like collisions, physics and rendering.
Good collaboration between the designers and the programmers is what leads to optimized games. Either the programmers for the engine were not communicated the scale of the design, or the designers weren’t communicated the limitations of the engine.
These discrepancies are always ironed out during the performance optimization phase of the development. Which takes months to years. Capcom did not do this for DD2 in order to hit the deadline.
@@txmetalcobra engines have distinct side effects, not feelings. Fallout 4 and Starfield claim to be different engines but both feel the same. Engines can have other engines as add-ons, like euphoria inside of the rage engine.
Even if it was due to engines, why would they develop on something not suit for the job?
@@Fusion05 EA forced Bioware to use Frostbite for Dragon Age Inquisition, an engine designed for first person shooters, and it made the dev team's job a nightmare. Capcom could have very well done the same to DD2's devs.
General Sam's review says it best. All these NPCs and they don't care at all what you do. It would have been better of just being set out in the wilderness. What's the point of a City?
Yeah agree. They put so much simulation on the NPCs which are wasted due to lack of scripting and dialogue.
Hitman (2016) - huge crowds of dozens of NPCs with plenty of emergent behaviour and fine performance.
Meanwhile game from 2024 - Can barely run 10 NPCs on screen with way more powerful CPUs
hitman has a way more controlled setting though to be fair, and I‘d expect dd world, system and npcs to be more/differently complex
the 300k rats is a good counter example. visually stunning, but not much to actually interact with or think about in terms of behavior.
@@wuoarh0815 Also AI of the "crowd NPCs" in the newer Hitman games is simplified compared to that of the regular NPCs. It's not very noticeable in normal gameplay, but they have a reduced number of animations and behaviours. And if the player "goes loud" and causes them to panic, their panic/fleeing response and escape route is entirely scripted. By comparison when a regular NPC in those Hitman games becomes alerted there is virtually limitless variety in where they might run to in the level depending on where the player is.
But yeah at the same time... developers really need to figure this stuff out if we're going to keep getting consoles with weak-ish CPUs. It's not just a console thing though, in my opinion you shouldn't need to buy the latest x3D or Intel equivalent CPU to run games at a consistent 60fps on PC either. At that point it's at least as much an optimization issue as it is a hardware one.
@@wuoarh0815 well do something between Hitman and Plague that works. Make games with graphics/performance for the hardware that exists today.
There is The Running Man in the background: unmistakable Jesse Ventura in the role of Captain Freedom.
if they can do coop with just 2 player plus their own pawns running around
I was so hype for this game, but i’ll probably stop playing until they add the dlc later on. I haven’t loss interest so fast in a game in a long time 😭 Deff prefer DDDA
Sometimes the framerate drops outside of towns as well. If the terrain is a bit more difficult to navigate it seems like your 3 pawn companions start using up all CPU performance. Also when there are ghosts flying through terrain and your pawns try to attack them the same thing can happen. The game is just horribly inefficiently coded or something.
They would have to drop the resolution to like 1080p in order to hit 60fps, thats the simple solution lower the resolution and framerate will increase
It feels like half of the money gone to implenent the sphinx...
This game is realy well made those named other game use tech that are complete differentes with instancing everywhere, saying capcom dont know what they doing meanwhile we never had combat with mob that good in history and them trying to make unique interaction as much as they can is wild
NO PAIN NO GAIN
MORE GAIN MORE PAIN
I wouldn't even mind but Holy crap the NPC pop-in is absolutely unacceptable. Clearly rushed and just simply did not give enough of a sh** to do anything about it.
I have a feeling they rushed out this game just to test the engine in an open world environment before the next Monster Hunter
Like we dont really give a shit how it works just make it work. As a buyer i dont care how you make games just make a good game ffs
I think this game will be a perfect example as to how irrelevant the Ps5 Pro can be in certain circumstances.
Yes, one CPU-limited game among the dozens of GPU-limited ones.
According to your logic, this game is a "perfect" example of how irrelevant every CPU on the market can be "in certain circumstances." This is such a bad take.
PS5 Pro is still using the same Zen 2 processor as PS5 with only a 10% increase in clock speeds. It's not gonna give people 60fps in true next gen games like Dragon's Dogma 2 and GTA 6. It will rely heavily on Sony's upscaling tech (which to be fair will be far behind Nvidia's DLSS), their version of frame gen (which they will try to hide the input lag with forced V-sync and motion blur), and whatever RT they can come up with (which again pales in comparison to Nvidia who has actual RT cores handling that in their GPU's). It will be "good enough" for the casual audience but not aimed for enthusiasts who always go for better hardware with the PC.
Yes, the ps5 pro will be a vanity item. Same as a Gucci bag and equally useless.
Excellent news, €80 extra in my wallet for the purchase of the new PS5 pro, we are tired of lame and poorly optimized games released ahead of time
Im surprised the video doesnt just say "Denuvo" and ends
To the one posting the question : it’s the engine, RE Engine was built for linear scripted Resident Evil games. The engine was not built for an open world game like DD2, so they ran into issues.
Hitman: Blood Money murder of crows mission will cause modern consoles to have a heart atttack 💀
Anyone else distracted by Running Man in the background? 😅
The RE engine just isn't meant for large scale open world environs
for now at least
@@Koeras16 I mean we are in fact talking about the here and now lol. We need to see actual examples of it being "for large scaled open worlds".
Monster Hunter Wilds monkaS
@@Koeras16 Trash engine for large scale open world games they should abandon the engine for these types of games.
Did not bother to finish the game. Only way i got minimum 60fps+ was sin Dynamic resolution ON, with that OFF it was all over 25-100ish fps in 1440p with 7800X3D, rtx 4080, 32Gb ram
Running the game at 4k forces most of the load on to the GPU and really helps.
But here is the question. Does every NPC need that calculation? If a monster attack them sure turn it on. But if they are just in the tavern drinking why are they killing my cpu?
He's wrong there's tons of pawns walking around at all times. I never run into invisible people on ps5
s played everything from NES pixel shooters to AAA masterpieces, I cannot justify 30FPS on a next gen game nowadays. On my PC or PS5 I just think they need to make that a priority.
2:30 you could see the contemplation of "weeks.. no months.. oh god years" happening in almost real time lol
If Cyberpunk with a bunch of NPCs on screen can run at 60 on my PC then there's absolutely no excuse for DD2 running at 40 in a city.
Do you think they are computing NPCs that are not on scene?
I mean, there is the Oxcart travelling from one point to another. There is comments of some NPCs dying during their life routine while you are in another part of the map.
This kind of behaviour, similar to Red Dead Redemption II NPC life routine, could compromise the CPU like it is. But for sure, there are better ways than updating all NPC in the world states every moment, if it is indeed the case and if it is what is causing the bad CPU usage.
Solution is simple. Don't load too many unimportant NPCs in a city and don't simulate everything about them. I didn't run around Witcher 3's or Cyberpunk's cities expecting to have over-the-top protagonist level interactions with everyone around. It did work well in old game, with pawns. If other games do this, this one can too, and the capital wasn't even that crowded. Night City in Cyberpunk had way more people. If you crashed a car near them or if you took out a gun, they panicked and ran away.
It can be done. It's that they didn't optimize it enough. X4 for example has tens of sectors that can have multiple large scale battles going on in them. What do they do? They divide it into OOSC and ISC (out of sector combat and in sector combat). In sector has physics and collisions, out of sector has simplified combat calculations. You can have hundreds of ships battling it in realtime all over the known space. All NPCs in Cyberpunk have collosions and react to happenings around them. Considering I can visually SEE pawns just floating into view from thin air, I personally wouldn't mind if they didn't have full physical reactions in crowded spaces. I expect a new dedicated gaming rig to handle a game that frankly doesn't have so great graphics or even great crowds. Again, Cyberpunk and X4 beat it in the terms of concurrent objects on screen by far.
Someone said, 'Resident Evil 4 is one of the best ported games.' That's why I trusted DD2, and immediately got betrayed.
I think its partly a lack of experience of the team at least in designing this specific element, when I think of capcom, I dont really think of huge persistent open worlds. I also think RE engine, which is a good engine, is also not really suited to open worlds either. The RE engine probably needs some extra work added to it before its used for their next open world game
How an AI so stupid uses so much CPU is beyond me. Pawns and NPCs are pants-on-head retarded in this game. They didn't improve it at all from the first game. In fact, I think it might be worse. They throw themselves off cliffs, dive into deep water, stand around doing nothing in combat, waste heavy-hitting abilities on trash mobs, get hung up on the environment, forget where they're going, the list goes on. It's terrible. There are MMO bots with better AI than this.
It seems as if Capcom made the NPC's as a slow loading texture imo. How is it possible that assassin's Creed Unity has an incredible amount of CPU utilization using Jaguar CPU's running at a measley 1.6 and 1.7 ghz respectfully. Not sure where all the CPU cycles are going but Capcom needs to do better than this imo.
Its just not well optimized. Trying to run it on steam deck it will NEVER go above roughly 40% CPU/65% GPU usage, yet its stuck at ~15 fps. It's a shame because when the game works it's SO MUCH FUN but lots of people are going to have issues.
I REALLY want to believe they're going to be releasing a few patches to optimize it better, shame that Dragon's Dogma has the smallest team on Capcom if they had the same size team as Monster Hunter this could have been a GotY contender.
Because you can only update an engine so far, eventually you gotta start over but money
It is interesting how things like Raytracing barely affect the performance at all because the game is actually not very GPU heavy but the load on the CPU makes everyone that doesn't have a top range CPU get completely inconsistent and bad framerates and the game is now out for a month and there has been done NOTHING against it. Not even an update like "Yeah it's taking longer than expected because we are changing a lot of stuff to reduce CPU load"
I'm telling y'all, we will get a small update in like a month that "addresses performance issues on all platforms" and will most likely do absolutely nothing and thats it with the game. Capcom has made their money and that's all they really do care about.
I'd be in the front lines defending _Dragon's Dogma 2_ as an amazing game, but the performance is not something I will ever even try to reason out.
It sucks because the game is even more fun than the first title.
I have zero believe that capcom is going to fix performance on the DD2. Nope, no witty comments, just typing things out of memory about performance issue on capcom games.
Maybe it’s all matter of the engine they using
I love DD2 but my god, it’s odd!
Either way, a patch to improve performance is overdue.
I'm worried about monster hunter wilds
A large part of it is definitely denuvo
They probably going to fix it just like Dark Arisen version, there a survey for planned DLC, if they churn out DLC for the game and doesn't fix the perfomance issue, Capcom officially fucked
How have you guys not done your research?. It’s the npc pawns that are the problem. Each pawn is loading other players data from their own games with all the missions and unlocks they have done. It’s all this information and so many of them in the towns causing the cpu issue.
It would've been "easier" to run the game logic in the Dragon's Dogma 1 engine and only the rendering pipeline on the RE engine.
running both at the same time would be more performant than just running the RE for both things.