Dragon's Dogma 2: a mod to partially restore path tracing – News

As a reminder, the path tracing is a sort of evolved version of ray tracing which takes into account the bounces of light on objects to further improve the visual rendering. A complete simulation of photon behavior, the holy grail of light photorealism. The technology is still in its infancy given its immense demand in terms of machine resources and its enormous complexity, although cutting-edge software, such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2, have already integrated it into their copy.

And there was light

EXXXCellent has made the hidden tools of path tracing of Dragon's Dogma 2 on Nexus Mods. The YouTube channel Digital Foundry, always at the forefront of visuals, hastened to make a comparative video between the ray tracing standard implemented by Capcom and secret tools. The result is clear: shadows, textures and lights find a second youth (bad for a month-old game) thanks to the path tracing. The metals, in particular, look sublime. You can check out some examples below.

So why did Capcom log the path tracing to jails rather than putting him on stage? Digital Foundry has its own little theory. First of all, the path tracing applied in Dragon's Dogma 2 is incomplete. Compared to the spectacular implementations of Alan Wake 2 or Cyberpunk 2077, there remains a lot of noise“visual noise” – visual irregularities like moving pixels on stationary objects or sparks fluttering at night for no reason. Eurogamer also mentions that the path tracing may have been used by Capcom artists to obtain photorealistic in-game references to adjust standard lights without the intention of making these development tools public. Not a finished implementation, then.

It also turns out that the path tracing very negatively affects the performance of the game. Digital Foundry quickly tested the thing. If their copy runs at 105 FPS in 4K thanks to their RTX 4090, apply the path tracing has a satisfactory level of quality brings down the frame rate at 42 frames per second. Not enough to turn the game into a slideshow, but a certain weight, especially for the vast majority of bikes which already cough in certain environments without path tracing.