Dragon's Dogma 2: Why Exactly Is It So CPU Intensive?

Generally speaking, there's two ways to make NPCs in games: - The classic approach, where every NPC is its own actor with their own AI tree, own skeletal mesh, own CPU based animation controller and their own physical simulation, most of which is running on a single thread, or at least, sharing the same thread with all other NPCs for the respective system. The vast majority of games still use this approach, because it's simple to implement and very flexible, meaning it's easier to make NPCs as complex as they need to be. Downside is it doesn't scale very well, and it's gotten worse compared to older games since the increased complexity of NPCs has far outstripped any performance gains from modern hardware, particularly on the CPU side of things. - The other approach is a dedicated mob system, that heavily relies on mesh and animation instancing (where multiple NPCs reuse the same mesh and animation computations), compute shaders/vertex animations (meaning animations are done on the GPU instead of the CPU) and things like Entity Component Systems, which try to aggressively optimize memory layouts and allow for high levels of parallelization. Downside is that those systems are exponentially more complex and oftentimes quite limiting, which usually means that your NPCs will end up having to be much simpler in terms of visual fidelity and behavior. Most, if not all games that feature a large quantity of NPCs (think Witcher 3, Assassins Creed, Cyberpunk, Hogwarts Legacy) tend to feature both. Where "hero NPCs" like enemies or companions are done using the classic approach to allow for complex interactions like combat n such, and all the background actors are filled in via the mob system and are much less interactive/complex. It would appear to me that DD2/RE:Engine doesn't feature such a system or they didn't want to use one for some reason and were probably hoping they could just get away with it. Usually such decisions have to be made pretty early, so guess by the time they realized things weren't working out it was too late budget/timeline wise to change course.

as a Stellaris Player, i found it VERY FUNNY that, once people found out the perfornance issiues were caused by NPCs, they came up with the same solution we did.

The NPC pop-in is something I noticed in another RE Engine game: Street Fighter 6's World Tour mode. While not as severe as DD2's, I do think it hints that RE Engine's weakpoint is continuous AI.

I don’t think performance issues of DD2 will ever be fixed. It needs a whole overhaul. They might have to change several decisions that they took in the planning phase of sdlc. Since Capcom has already made their money, and a lot of consumer base is defending any sort of criticism, I highly doubt this game will be fixed the way Cyberpunk or No man’s sky got patched.

If you fight a dragon in a city with >10 npcs/pawns, there is barely any difference in framerate in comparison to normal on pc. So I'd guess their idle AI is pretty much as expensive to run as their combat AI, which is weird.

When we see massive cities in older games packed with npcs like in The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077 and the Assassin's Creed games, it really makes us question why the cities in modern games are so much more cpu heavy without being nearly as much crowded.

It really is weird that you can look at a lot of 2014-2018 games and see how much is going on onscreen, compared to now, it's barely changed, in many cases it's gone backwards, but somehow games require a lot more CPU, Ram and GPU horsepower to run at a lesser level

The NPCs aren't fantastic enough to warrant the performance cost. Like the defenders of this game need to admit this somehow.

I love how 10 roaming NPCs in DD2 demand more compute than 500 NPCs individually fighting in Bannerlord while taking orders.

Plot twist: the NPC logic was coded by YandereDev.

The problem with DD2 is that it is not completely finished, Capcom released it much ahead of time to close its fiscal year that just ends in March of this year, there are many aspects that tell you the rush they put on it during its development, DD2 needed at least one to two years of development to optimize, polish and realize the real vision of its potential.

The NPCs in Fable 3 were very impressive and that's on Xbox 360. I can only come away with the opinion that the Dragon's Dogma 2 dev teams just didn't do a very good job in this particular aspect of their game.

It`s easy to be a PC gamer nowadays, wait 3-4 years after the release and get them cheap or free 99% bugfixed.

It's just the engine wasn't prep for open world. They just decided to do a trial and error with DD2. Then by the time other games come out they would have work out all the kinks.

I knew this game was cool when I was fighting an ogre on a top hill and when I fell off the cliff, one of my pawns actually caught me in their hands to keep me from fall damage. I was impressed with that mechanic. This game actually has some smart ass AI/simulation.

If this is an issue in Dragon’s Dogma 2, what is it going to be like in Monster Hunter Wilds? THAT’S what worries me.

Gotta love the Running Man in the background

In most games NPCs have a set of strict binding game rules that limits what they can do. This includes a set of simple dialogue, world space and character collision map, and walking animation tied to a set path and radius ( assuming they move at all, many times they are fixed in place ). In DD2 nearly all NPC have essentially an open script, meaning they can walk around wherever they want no matter how far they are from the player character. On top of that they are free to engage in a battle that is completely unaided by the character, this alone is a hugely chaotic and requires an enormous amount of CPU processing to achieve in real time. The code is not perfect in DD2, no code is, that being said optimizing will get you little in CPU performance gains. The system itself is just that demanding like it or not. I have tested DD2 cpu utilization on the latest intel i9-14900KS and it was totally bottlenecked in cities, memory bandwidth isn’t enough for this game. I re tested it with AMDs ThreadRipper Pro 7995 WX and even that monster of a CPU was 83% utilized with the memory bandwidth just barely being enough. TLDR: DD2 is the next Crysis for CPUs.

I feel like its just the re engine it was always used for Resident evil games which arent open world but this game is open world so I think its an engine issue

I got my doubts on A.I. being the issue. What is more likely is the CPU is doing graphics work before passing it on to the GPU. This kind of processing is very normal on lesser optimized engines, especially those from years past.