Dragon's Dogma 2 is bringing even super-mighty PCs to their knees, and Capcom seemingly disabled the option for some performance-boosting DLSS frame generation just before launch. Now a modder has brought that option back, and in doing so, revealed why Capcom disabled it in the first place.
DLSS - or more properly, deep learning super sampling - is a set of AI-powered technologies baked into the hardware of modern Nvidia graphics cards. Instead of creating nonsense Google results or images of people with unusual numbers of fingers, this AI tech can improve performance and image clarity in PC games, and generally does a damn impressive job of it.
When people typically talk about DLSS, they're usually referring to the upscaling tech, which allows a game to run with a better frame rate at a lower internal resolution, and the resulting image is then upscaled to your desired resolution. This option exists as normal in Dragon's Dogma 2, but it's not as useful as in many other games since the RPG is more demanding on your CPU than your graphics card.
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DLSS frame generation is a different tech which creates AI-generated images that slot in between those that the game itself creates, effectively giving you the perception that your frame rate has doubled. As our friends at PC Gamer noted yesterday, there's actually a file for DLSS frame generation included in the game, but there's no way to enable it.
That is, unless you've got a mod. PureDusk, who you might remember as the modder who brought DLSS to Starfield ahead of its official implementation, has enabled DLSS frame generation in Dragon's Dogma 2. You can grab it on PureDark's Patreon for free. Be warned, however, that there's a chance your game might start crashing if you install it.
"People are reporting having crashes/freezes with FG, probably the reason it's hidden at launch," PureDark says. "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." Capcom has confirmed that this official update is coming, but not when. In a Steam post, the publisher says "we plan to add DLSS Frame Generation in a future title update."
The long-anticipated launch of Dragon's Dogma 2 has been met with a mixed early response due to microtransactions and performance issues, which Capcom responded to by promising to squash bugs and remedy frame rate issues, and pointing out that microtransactions can be obtained in-game. Whether the rest of the game can rise above those issues remains to be seen, but the early Dragon's Dogma 2 scores are certainly promising.
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