Kingdom Come: Deliverance II Performance – 40 Graphics Cards Tested!
How Much Does it Cost?
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is available now from Steam for just £49.99. It is also available as a Gold Edition for £65.99 that includes the Gallant Huntsman’s Kit, 3 Upcoming Expansions, and the Sields of Seasons Passing. However, those last two are also available in the Expansion Pass, priced at £24.99. Check out the official Steam page here. The game is also sitting at “Very Positive” reviews with nearly 6000 reviews in total at the time of writing.
Conclusion
So that’s another big test for a newly released game, done. In terms of performance, I feel that there’s something for everyone, no matter whether you’re on older hardware, newer hardware, less powerful hardware, or more powerful. We all know that CryEngine can be a very demanding game engine, but depending on what the developer implements through optimisations, it can scale very well, but obviously there are a lot of driving factors behind it. If you’re on an older GPU, you may start to see that VRAM usage does start to get used quite rapidly, but we never see things pushing at the very limits of the card’s capabilities. What we found is that if you throw a card with more VRAM at the game, it will use it in any way that it can, and this relates to better performance and higher frame rates in general.
Performance
Being CryEngine, we’ve typically seen struggles on AMD hardware, though this has improved in recent years, it’s still clear to see that NVIDIA performs better, relatively speaking. Though if you are after more performance, the inclusion of FSR and DLSS is always there, and this is something that isn’t natively supported through CryEngine, so it’s nice to see this being implemented, though I would have liked to have seen the option for XeSS as well, as Intel are also making strides recently, and it would level the playing field in terms of technologies.
CryEngine
The game, at least from an engine and performance standpoint, is an interesting one. As a lot of developers are moving to Unreal Engine and focusing heavily on baking in ray tracing features and needing upscaling to function, even on the latest and most powerful hardware, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II takes a slightly different approach. I feel that the developers, who are small in the grand scheme of things, have created a game that looks good, even if it is missing the glitz and glam that other titles are focusing on, and instead, put their efforts into the game, and I honestly can’t fault that.
Scalable Performance
They’ve gone for a tried and tested platform that works and offers strong scalable performance, especially when you look at the likes of an RTX 2080 at 1080p on high getting around the same levels of performance as an RTX 5090 at 4K on the experimental preset. Sure, you’re going to see a visual difference, but we’re talking about a GPU still holding up after seven years compared to a $2000 flagship that’s less than a month old, and that’s a testament to what’s been done here in trying to make the game accessible to gamers old and new, and I honestly like the approach they’ve taken. Sure, I want the best visual fidelity in the latest games, but if it means that the actual game (visuals aside) suffers, then I know what I’d rather have the focus on. How about you?
