If you’ve got a beefy PC, Kingdom Come: Deliverance can really push it hard thanks to the advanced shadow, lighting and rendering tech. But even with a pretty decent gaming PC, the game’s Ultra High and even High presets are pretty demanding.
Digital Foundry broke down some of the more taxing settings in a breakdown of the visual quality between the PC and the PS4 Pro. The video initially is a comparison between the two platforms, with the PC undeniably coming out better, given that the PS4 Pro runs the game on effectively the medium preset.
A shot of texture quality between the PS4 Pro and PC, with the latter being vastly more detailed
Of course, how much of a bump you get on the PC really depends on the hardware you have. And as it turns out, even with really good hardware, maintaining a consistent 60 FPS in all areas can be exceptionally tough.
A lot of the tech in Kingdom Come: Deliverance, such as the advanced volumetric lighting, raycasting for shadows indoors and the dense foliage textures, have a habit of flogging PCs to the kerb. DF also noted, courtesy of a chat with Warhorse’s lead programmer, that CRYENGINE functions in such a way that hammers CPU cores (moreso on AMD, apparently).
For the breakdown between the NVIDIA and AMD cards, and a look at the benchmarks when the presets are dropped to High and then Medium, skip to 7m 55s below.
The short version is: even with a GTX 1080 Ti and an i5-8600K, you’ll still see noticeable frame rate drops below 60 FPS on the Ultra High preset. For those with more mainstream cards, like the GTX 1060 or RX 580, you’ll want to start on the Medium preset with a few individual tweaks if you want to maintain a flat 60 FPS in all scenarios. Shadows in this game hit your PC hard, although at the top end they do look very, very good.
It’ll be nice to see how KCD holds up when the next generation of GPUs is released. Most of the hardest hitting settings impact the CPU quite heavily, however. So for the foreseeable future, perhaps 15th century Bohemia really will be the new Crysis.
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