Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen: Dragon’s Dogma Optimization & Known Fixes

My goal is to make this guide as simple to follow and as accurate as possible, it’s good to remember that we all make mistakes, even those who push to be perfect.

If this guide helped you it would be heavily appreciated if you liked, favorited or commented on it!

If you’re feeling charitable feel free to give me some steam points ~ check below to learn how!

Dragon’s Dogma is a relatively old game, so the graphic settings aren’t that vital unless you have a pretty cheap setup. However, based on community input and just testing on my own, the below settings are what I found to be the best. If you disagree please comment respectfully and let me know so I can test more!

Screen Resolution – Personal preference. For Steam Deck, 1280 x 800
Fullscreen – Leave this on unless you have a reason to use Borderless
V-Sync – My advice is to leave it on and if you notice screen tearing to turn it off
Framerate – 60hz for Steam Deck, Variable if you’re over 60hz on your monitor.
Anti-Aliasing – FXAA
HDR – Depends on your monitor, personally I have this off
Shadow Quality – High
Texture Detail – High
Texture Filtering – ANISO X16
Grass Quality – High
Effect Volume – Personal choice
Depth of Field – Personal choice, however some have reported better FPS with this on
Camera FOV – Personal choice
Brightness – Personal choice (and based on monitor)

Steam Deck is a bit different in terms of optimized settings. Using the below settings, you should be able to hit a smooth 60fps. I do not own a Steam Deck, so this is purely Reddit talking here. The original settings were posted by u/SamuraiMujuru.

Screen Resolution – 1280 x 800
Fullscreen – On
Framerate – 60hz
Anti-Aliasing – FXAA
HDR – Low
Shadow Quality – Medium
Texture Detail – High
Texture Filtering – ANISO X16
Grass Quality – Medium
Effect Volume – Personal choice (I’d try Medium)
Distance Scaling – Medium
Depth of Field – Personal choice, however some have reported better FPS with this on
Camera FOV – Personal choice
Brightness – Personal choice (and based on monitor)

I personally ran into this issue, if you are using an AMD card that doesn’t support DX9 then your game will run horribly regardless of what you try, unless you download a patch.

To fix this issue, follow the below steps or skip to the visual guide, which was created by Dugarr.

1. Make sure Dragon’s Dogma is CLOSED.
2. Go to the download page[github.com]
3. Scroll down and under assets click “dxvk-2.3.tar.gz“
4. Go into the folder you downloaded and copy the file named “d3d9.dll“. It should be on the top.
5. Paste this into your DDDA folder, which is normally located under C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\DDDA or for GOG C:\GOG Games\DDDA
6. Simply boot up the game. You may experience a crash or loss of FPS when initially loading in, however once the shaders are loaded you should experience smooth FPS.

Visual Guide

Unfortunately this fix will NOT work if you are already using the AMD patch. I’m sure you can find some workaround to make them both work, but I have not been able to. If you are using the AMD patch and you want to use the Ultrawide patch, you won’t be able to as of now. I’ve included a fix to make the game run at 1920×1080 at the bottom of this section for those who are using the AMD patch.

To fix this issue, follow the below steps or skip to the visual guide, which was created by Kaldaien.

1. Make sure Dragon’s Dogma is CLOSED.
2. Go to the download page[github.com]
3. Scroll down and under assets click “AgDrag.zip“
4. Go into the folder you downloaded and copy all of the files.
5. Paste these into your DDDA folder, which is normally located under C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\DDDA or for GOG C:\GOG Games\DDDA
6. Simply boot up the game. You may experience a crash or loss of FPS when initially loading in, however once the shaders are loaded you should experience smooth FPS.

Visual Guide

If you are using the AMD patch already and want to get the game running at 1920×1080 follow the below steps:

1. Make sure Dragon’s Dogma is CLOSED.
2. Go into your DDDA documents folder, which is normally located in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\CAPCOM\DRAGONS DOGMA DARK ARISEN
3. Open up the ‘config‘ file.
4. Scroll down until you see [DISPLAY] and under Resolution paste Resolution=1920×1080