Among the game files of Dragon’s Dogma 2 is hidden the path tracing or in any case an incomplete version, which if desired you can activate thanks to Graphics Suite Alpha mod by EXXXCellent, who first discovered the presence of this technology in game code strings. The mod attracted the curiosity of Digital Foundry’s tech enthusiasts, who created a dedicated analysis video, which you can find in the player below.
The mod in question, which you can download from NexusMods if you want, allows you to activate path tracing for lighting, shadows and reflections in real time. The result is excellent, with details of materials and light sources of much higher quality than the simple ray-traced global illumination available in Dragon’s Dogma 2.
Digital Foundry tests
Not all that glitters is gold. In fact, the mod does not add any denoising, creating a sort of grain effect that dirty the image. Furthermore, performance is greatly affected by the use of this technology.
According to Digital Foundry’s tests, with optimal path tracing settings, 4K resolution and DLSS Performance, a monster of power like the RTX 4090 can drop to 40 fps in GPU-bounded scenarios.
It seems clear, therefore, that at a certain point in the development of Dragon’s Dogma 2, the Itsuno team worked to implement path tracing, only to discard the idea at a later time, a bit like what happened with Frame Generation NVIDIA, already included in the game files but can only be activated using a mod.
