A new Dragon's Dogma 2 mod published earlier this week on Nexus Mods by EXXXcellent allows users to activate path tracing and/or tweak ray tracing in various ways.
The mod can be installed either manually or through Fluffy Mod Manager, as most other Dragon's Dogma 2 mods. However, the RE Framework is required for the mod to work at all since its options appear in the RE Framework UI.
As mentioned above, the 'Graphics Suite' adds actual path tracing, which significantly improves the game's visuals. However, the downside is that denoisers don't seem to work much, making the graphics very grainy. Perhaps a fix will be found at some point. The Dragon's Dogma 2 mod also offers additional options, including a performance boost for ray tracing with a slight visual penalty and the ability to turn off spotlights, which comes in handy when you use path tracing.
Here's the official overview posted by the mod's creator:
- Path Tracing: Raytracing Mode in "RT Options". Setting this to other modes changes the RT implementation from RTGI to Path Tracing. Path Tracing is very noisy, and denoiser options don't seem to affect it, but the PT shadows are amazing.
- Noise in Path Tracing: Currently, it seems none of the denoiser options affect path tracing at all. Using DLSS seems to yield better results than FSR in motion, but using FSR looks better than DLSS in Photo Mode, so switch to FSR if you want to take nice photos. I've had moderate success at denoising the final image by using SPP4, Bounce 1 and DLSS Balanced at 4K (I have a 4090 though), using a very very gentle denoiser with ReShade
- Spot Light Control: Turn off the invisible spotlights that permanently backlight the player to get more consistent Path Tracing lighting.
- RTGI (non-path traced) Performance boost (sacrifices quality): Enable BhvTraversalHeatmap in RT options. This seems to use the heatmap that the PS5 version of the game uses, which detracts from visual quality a bit but greatly improves performance (I saw a 20 FPS increase on a 4090 at 4K). This only works with the default "ASVGF" Raytracing mode.
- RaytracingResRatio in RT Options. Only affects RTGI modes like ASVGF. Does what the Quality RT mod does: increases the RT resolution.
- Aggressive Denoise in RT Options. Again, does what the Quality RT mod does and disables/enables the denoiser. I still recommend using Quality RT for the above 2 settings because of the UI pause the author implemented.
- Tonemapping: Mostly exposure controls
- LDR Post Processing: Disable the game's entire array of post-process effects for a neutral base to use ReShade with.
- SSAO/SDFAO Controls: Increase native AO radius for non-RT users, no ReShade needed!
- Screen Space Reflections: Some of these settings do something, most of them don't. SSR will look bad anyway.
Another must-have Dragon's Dogma 2 mod is the one that removes the dreadful Dragonsplague. In other Dragon's Dogma 2 news, the game just got a new update, and CAPCOM revised its financial forecast upward due to the game's satisfactory sales.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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