Kingdom Come: Deliverance II has launched in a great technical state, bucking the trend of games launching in rather poor states in the 2020s, and feeling almost old-school in this, according to a new in-depth technical analysis shared online.
The tech experts at Digital Foundry recently took a good look at the second entry in the series by Warhorse Studios, highlighting how going with CryEngine was a winning choice. Even in its DirectX 12 form, the game engine developed by Crytek delivers an essentially stutter-free experience even on mid and low-end hardware. On a fairly old Ryzen 5 3600 CPU and RTX 4060 GPU with a truncated PCIe bus, targeting 60 FPS at 1080p resolution at medium settings, which include demanding real-time software ray-traced global illumination, smoothness was impeccable even in areas with high NPC density, with no traversal or shader compilation stuttering, which is quite impressive considering the game doesn't feature visible shader pre-compilation, likely conducted instead during load times and during the game itself in an asynchronous manner that burdens the CPU less, thus allowing even an old CPU to handle the game smoothly. Put against other open-world RPGs running on different engines, like Dragon's Dogma 2 and Avowed, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is the definitive winner in terms not only of performance but of visual quality as well, as the two other games definitely don't deliver the same quality even at similar medium settings.
Besides going over Kingdom Come: Deliverance II's smooth performance, the Digital Foundry analysis goes over the game's excellent lighting and environments, how the Ultra settings are not really worth much, some optimization tips, and more. You can check out the analysis in full below.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is now available on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S worldwide. You can learn more about the second entry in the series by Warhorse by reading Chris' glowing review.
