Introduction

Dragon Quest is one of the longest-running RPG video game series around. It all started with Dragon Quest on the Nintendo Entertainment system in 1986, which inspired the whole RPG game industry, and numerous titles have followed for pretty much every platform in existence. In recent times, Dragon Quest has been published by Square Enix, who also publish the Final Fantasy Series. While not hugely well known in the West, everyone in Japan has heard of Dragon Quest, where it is more popular than Final Fantasy and similar role-playing games.

You play as the Luminary, a boy who's destined to save the world from the "Dark One" because he's the reincarnation of the hero who saved the world before. Obviously, you have to fight the evil forces that don't want you to save the world, so you'll team up with several other characters to achieve your mission. Right at the start, you even make enemies with a whole kingdom that follows the twisted logic that your appearance (to save the world) could be the start of the beginning of the end (if you fail), so they try to hunt you down.

Square Enix has chosen to use Unreal Engine 4 for Dragon Quest XI, probably because the engine supports all major gaming platforms, which makes the porting process much easier. The PC version uses DirectX 11. While the PS4 and 3DS versions have been on the market for about a month, the PC version was just released on Steam. Given the multi-platform nature of this game, we probably can't expect AAA PC graphics, which follows its own art style that is not unsimilar to what we've seen from Zelda on Switch.

In this performance review, we put Dragon Quest XI through our selection of graphics cards using the latest drivers from both AMD and NVIDIA. We measure the game's performance across various screen resolutions, investigate VRAM usage, and even test the game's multi-core CPU performance scaling.