Is Dragon's Dogma 2 finally fixed with patch 7 for PS5 and Series X/S?

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a beautiful title that may go down as one of the best looking games of the year. Capcom’s open-world epic features some outstanding lighting technology, with detailed ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) giving the title a very refined appearance. Despite this technical achievement, the game shipped with substantial performance and visual faults, with broken image reconstruction on Xbox Series machines and frame-rate issues in dense city areas, in addition to other issues.

That was true both for the game’s launch version as well as its second patch, which we covered in a video shortly after launch. Just last week, Capcom debuted a new patch, simply called patch seven, which promises frame-rate uplifts and new visual toggles. Does this update cure Dragon’s Dogma’s ailments, or does it still suffer from key technical flaws?

Let’s start with Series X. In terms of basic visual settings, we’re looking at a largely similar experience between the second and seventh patches. We still see the same beautiful RTGI presentation with ray tracing turned on, with a noticeably less striking appearance when RT is set to off. I couldn’t really spot basic settings tweaks between the two patches, which is about what you’d expect.