Kingdom Come: Deliverance Performance Review

Conclusion

There is not much more that needs to be said other than the fact that Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a challenging game to run, continuing the CryEngine’s long-running reputation of creating demanding titles for both PC and console platforms.

Even modern console platforms like the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X cannot play this title at a stable 30 FPS, with both consoles using settings that are lower than what we see on PC at High settings. The Xbox One X is also the only console platform to achieve a resolution of over 1080p. 

On both the CPU and GPU sides Kingdom Come places a lot of strain on our system, requiring high core counts and a lot of GPU horsepower to run at high settings. Players will need at least four strong CPU cores to run this game well, especially in some of the title’s more demanding areas. 

On the GPU side, it is clear that Kingdom Come prefers AMD/Radeon GPU hardware, with our RX 480 almost achieving GTX 1070 levels of performance.  This doesn’t do much to counteract the fact that this title is insanely demanding, failing to hit a steady 60 FPS at 1080p high settings on a GTX 1080. 

While Kingdom Come: Deliverance can look beautiful in places, there is also a lot of ugly to go with that. At lower graphical settings, draw distances can also be an issue and the game’s bugs can often get in the way of having an ideal gaming experience outside of the game’s performance issues. There is a great game in here, but it may be worthwhile to wait for a few patches before playing. 

There are plenty of areas within Kingdom Come that can make performance tank hard, which means there is still a lot of room for optimisation, either by tweaking these target areas or making deeper changes to some visual effects that lessen the impact of specific dipping points. Finding areas where performance in tanks in games typical in almost every title, but when these dips are frequently located in unavoidable areas within the main story it is difficult to see why Warhorse hasn’t discovered and addressed these problem areas.  

Over the past few days, enterprising modders have found ways to edit the game to fix many of the game’s issues, with the option to disable v-sync being the first of many tweaking opportunities for the title. The main problem here is that some of these fixes should have been made available to users by Warhorse, as some of these tweaks have been found to decrease the likelihood of performance dips on some setups and improve the visuals of the game with little no performance loss. This makes it hard to see why Warhorse wouldn’t be able to enhance the game’s performance with future patches.

Kingdom Come offers a unique RPG experience that is not devoid of issues, though to say the least, I have experienced a lot more bugs in recent iterations of Skyrim. Most RPG fans will have experienced similar problems or worse in the past, though it is likely that many of Kingdom Come’s issues will be addressed with future patches. 

In all, Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a mixed bag, offering some beautiful scenes at a high hardware cost, making the title a difficult sell for users with old or low-end systems, especially if you want something that resembles a 60FPS framerate in all areas. Owners of this game should expect performance dips in several areas within the game, especially within large battles or other crowded sections of the game. 

You can join the discussion on Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s PC performance on the OC3D Forums.