Oliver Mackenzie and Alex Battaglia cover Dragon's Dogma 2 on all consoles (PS5, Series X, Series S) and PC. How does t…
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In visual settings, the PS5 and Series X are matched with each other, with similar shadow resolution, draw distances and texturing (time of day differences can suggest otherwise, but we're fairly confident about platform parity here). Both machines also use a checkerboard rendering technique, which is a familiar choice for RE Engine titles. Unfortunately though, the image resolve on Series X appears to be broken as of the launch build, with the visuals completely obscured by a fine grid of checkerboarding artefacts. It's a really disappointing issue and it should be resolved soon. RE Engine titles do seem to have recurrent challenges with checkerboarding on consoles - and it never seems to work properly on PC - so this isn't totally unexpected, but it's quite bad in this instance.
Producing an actual pixel count proved unusually difficult, as the game's motion blur can't be disabled - making it hard to find raw edges - and Series X is virtually uncountable as a result of its image quality issues. On PS5 it looks like the game runs at a checkerboarded 4K, and it's likely this is replicated on Series X. The PS5 at least has decent enough image quality, and it does a largely competent job of resolving a crisp image. Foliage does pose a bit of a concern though, as it tends to have considerable artefacting in motion.
Comparing the two consoles side-by-side for a moment, the Series X scores roughly a 10 percent or a circa-4fps performance win over the PS5 in matching shots. This isn't totally like-for-like because of the Series X's issues with resolving a proper checkerboarded image, but this does seem to be a pretty straightforward Series X win when GPU-limited. When-CPU limited the results are a little more ambiguous, with the PS5 seeming to take a performance win while performing the same run around the city. The one saving grace is that Series X has VRR support with low frame-rate compensation at 120Hz. That makes the game look smoother, relatively speaking, but city areas are again subpar with plenty of frame-variance that isn't tamed by the variable refresh rate - and PS5 doesn't support LFC at all, so its VRR is of more limited use.