Crowd Density Overhaul - The REAL FIX for NPC draw distance and crowd size!
Other mods like NPC Limit Control attempt to address this in a very hamfisted way, increasing or decreasing the range and number of NPC's being rendered with zero attempts to ensure necessary NPC's are always rendered or keep performance when the draw distance was increased. Mods like that are all obsolete now.
Crowd Density Overhaul gives you direct control over how many of the ambient soulless husk NPCs spawn in each settlement, while ensuring that every NPC who matters is always present. Shopkeepers, innkeepers, quest characters, oxcart crews, and Culling Request/Escort Quest civilians will remain completely unaffected by this mod.
The ambient NPC population in Dragon's Dogma 2 (particularly in the capitals Vernworth and Bakbattahl) causes huge performance problems for most people due to the sheer amount of NPC's being processed by the CPU (and how poorly optimized the NPC rendering pipeline itself is).
CDO changes this by maxing out their draw distance while natively suppressing a HUGE percentage of the NPC's that are allowed to spawn. You get the benefits of a large NPC draw distance while having significantly less individual NPC's nearby eating your CPU performance. It's a best-of-both-worlds scenario. You should get roughly the same performance as vanilla with much better draw distance and reasonable crowd sizes.
This is all 100% customizable in an REFramework menu as well!