Okingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is lastly right here, or it must be by the point you’re watching this, and like protagonist Henry of Skalitz, the franchise has come a good distance. The primary title initially started improvement in 2012 with crowd-funding going reside in 2014 to push its manufacturing additional. The end result was 2018’s Kingdom Come: Deliverance, an bold title with an emphasis on medieval realism in Fifteenth-century Bohemia.
Just like the setting, its launch was something however fantastical, with quite a few bugs, loading points, and so forth. Efficiency points slowed down the PS4 and Xbox One on the time. Whereas it wasn’t as disastrous as, say, Cyberpunk 2077, it could take a number of updates to get it to a suitable state for gamers.
Perish these darkish reminiscences, although, as a result of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a special beast completely. It performs exceptionally effectively on PC, and whereas the PS5 model (the one console we examined) has a number of noticeable hang-ups, the outcomes show greater than passable. With out additional ado, let’s dive into the technical features, graphical constancy and efficiency of each variations and what makes them shine.
Engine Overview and Enhancements Over Kingdom Come: Deliverance
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 runs on Crytek’s CryEngine, and whereas it’s very a lot the identical engine as the primary recreation in title, there have been heavy modifications. That is additionally the case for the sequel – Stolz-Zwilling even went so far as to say that it’s “very totally different from what one would name a ‘CryEngine.’”
Kingdom Come: Deliverance wasn’t a bad-looking recreation by any stretch, but its follow-up boasts some very spectacular enhancements. Lighting and shadows look extra pure and reasonable, with the tones extra precisely reflecting the latter. The lighting enhancements are all of the extra noticeable on characters, with Henry’s facial options coming throughout as extra outlined and reasonable.
It additionally doesn’t damage that bodily primarily based supplies are used, which appears to be like spectacular throughout, whether or not you’re admiring chainlink mail or gawking at shiny pauldrons. Environmental textures have seen a noticeable bump in high quality particularly on the bottom and in foliage, whereas reflections are extra pure.
Graphics Overview
When it comes to graphical settings, there’s a truthful quantity to tweak however nothing too loopy, together with object high quality, particles, lighting, and international illumination. It’s also possible to modify the shader high quality, shadows, textures, post-process high quality, and particulars on volumetric results, characters, and vegetation. A horizontal FOV slider is out there alongside movement blur and close to depth of subject settings, whereas upscaler choices embody Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR 3.1. All the standard choices can be found, together with High quality, Efficiency, Balanced, and Native AA.
Check Rig {Hardware} and Graphics Settings on PC
Our take a look at rig for the PC model consisted of an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, 64 GB of DDR4 RAM, and an NVMe PCI-e 4.0 SSD. The decision was set to 3840×2160 and the body charge restrict to 120 FPS (with V-Sync enabled) with a horizontal FOV of 95, Object Movement Blur and Close to DOF enabled. For the graphics settings, we set all the pieces to Extremely and the anti-aliasing to SMAA 2TX. Nvidia DLSS was additionally enabled and set to Efficiency.
PC Efficiency
Even with all the pieces set to Extremely and 4K decision, we achieved some very clean body charges on PC, hovering at 60 and 65 frames per second all through (often even going as much as 80-82 FPS). Throughout cutscenes, it could drop to 30 frames per second whereas conversations jumped again as much as 60-65.
It’s price noting, nevertheless, that in NPC-heavy scenes, the body charge would drop to 49 to 54 frames per second. The identical could possibly be noticed later throughout a sequence the place a number of NPCs are combating, and fires are raging dropping as little as 47 frames earlier than going again up once more after issues calmed down.
It’s price noting that the PC model additionally suffers from slight pop-in – emphasis on the “slight.” Granted, it’s a lot much less frequent than on PS5’s High quality Mode, however you’ll nonetheless discover it infrequently, particularly when using on horseback.
PS5 Efficiency vs High quality Mode
PS5 and Xbox Sequence X profit from two graphics modes – Efficiency and Constancy. The previous delivers a 2560×1440 decision at 30 frames per second, upscaled to 4K courtesy of FSR. The latter affords 60 FPS however at 1080p decision upscaled to 1440p. There’s a noticeable drop in sharpness, and although slight drops are seen at sure factors, like within the opening siege, the efficiency is in any other case very constant. Nevertheless, each modes undergo from pop-in – it’s most egregious on Efficiency and far much less so on High quality, however nonetheless seen. We additionally observed decrease body charges on NPC shadows forward of the participant throughout the preliminary horse journey.
PC vs PS5 High quality Mode
It ought to come as no shock, however the PC model is the clear winner right here. When it comes to picture high quality, decision, and efficiency, it’s clearly superior to the PS5 model’s High quality mode in each manner. The latter shouldn’t be discounted, particularly with how a lot constancy it affords alongside a strong body charge and sharp picture high quality, however we’d think about that almost all would favor enjoying Efficiency Mode for the 60 FPS bump. Right here’s hoping that the latter has its pop-in diminished to make it extra palatable.
Conclusion
There’s no two methods about it – Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a large step up over the unique when it comes to optimization and efficiency. The truth that it achieves this whereas considerably enhancing the graphical high quality, can also be worthy of reward. You’ll wish to expertise it on PC, which might look gorgeous and ship strong efficiency all through, although some scenes may nonetheless use extra optimization and polish.
Nevertheless, it’s nice to see that the PS5 model hasn’t fallen behind drastically, providing some dependable efficiency that stays constant in each High quality and Efficiency modes. The pop-in is understandably distracting and might often take away from the latter’s expertise, which is all of the extra annoying due to how good 60 FPS feels. However, it’s leagues forward of the primary recreation’s debut on PS4, and actually brings the medieval world to life in gorgeous element.
General, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a powerful success for the collection in each the graphical division and general polish. We didn’t run into bugs or glitches throughout our time testing, making for a really perfect expertise. In case you’re nonetheless on the fence concerning its efficiency, there’s little to worry, although as soon as once more, the absolute best possibility, particularly in constancy, is on PC.
