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 growth 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 on. 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 an appropriate state for gamers.
Perish these darkish reminiscences, although, as a result of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a unique beast fully. It performs exceptionally nicely on PC, and whereas the PS5 model (the one console we examined) has just a few noticeable hang-ups, the outcomes show greater than passable. With out additional ado, let’s dive into the technical points, 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 identify, 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 completely 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 life like, 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 life like.
It additionally doesn’t damage that bodily based mostly supplies are used, which seems to be 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 honest quantity to tweak however nothing too loopy, together with object high quality, particles, lighting, and world illumination. You may as well modify the shader high quality, shadows, textures, post-process high quality, and particulars on volumetric results, characters, and vegetation. A horizontal FOV slider is obtainable alongside movement blur and close to depth of area settings, whereas upscaler choices embrace Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR 3.1. All the same old choices can be found, together with High quality, Efficiency, Balanced, and Native AA.
Check Rig {Hardware} and Graphics Settings on PC
Our check 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 price 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 things to Extremely and the anti-aliasing to SMAA 2TX. Nvidia DLSS was additionally enabled and set to Efficiency.
PC Efficiency
Even with all the things 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 (sometimes 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, nonetheless, that in NPC-heavy scenes, the body price would drop to 49 to 54 frames per second. The identical may very well be noticed later throughout a sequence the place a number of NPCs are preventing, 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 widespread than on PS5’s High quality Mode, however you’ll nonetheless discover it on occasion, particularly when using on horseback.
PS5 Efficiency vs High quality Mode
PS5 and Xbox Collection 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 gives 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. Nonetheless, each modes endure from pop-in – it’s most egregious on Efficiency and far much less so on High quality, however nonetheless seen. We additionally seen decrease body charges on NPC shadows forward of the participant in the course of 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 method. The latter shouldn’t be discounted, particularly with how a lot constancy it gives alongside a stable body price and sharp picture high quality, however we’d think about that the majority would like enjoying Efficiency Mode for the 60 FPS bump. Right here’s hoping that the latter has its pop-in decreased to make it extra palatable.
Conclusion
There’s no two methods about it – Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is an enormous 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 may look beautiful and ship stable efficiency all through, although some scenes may nonetheless use extra optimization and polish.
Nonetheless, 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 may sometimes take away from the latter’s expertise, which is all of the extra annoying due to how good 60 FPS feels. Nonetheless, it’s leagues forward of the primary recreation’s debut on PS4, and actually brings the medieval world to life in beautiful element.
General, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a powerful success for the sequence in each the graphical division and total polish. We didn’t run into bugs or glitches throughout our time testing, making for a super expertise. If you happen to’re nonetheless on the fence concerning its efficiency, there’s little to concern, although as soon as once more, the very best possibility, particularly in constancy, is on PC.
