Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is proof, if any was ever needed, that you don’t need the latest graphics technology to have a great-looking game that also runs well
Testing new games to assess their performance across a range of gaming PCs is an interesting affair. Sometimes you get the highs of seeing some lovely graphics, all running quickly and smoothly, other times it’s day after day of frustration, dealing with crashes, stutters, and iffy coding. Every now and then, though, something comes my way and it’s an absolute delight from start to finish—and 2025 is off to a great start, all thanks to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.
I’ll be honest—before receiving the review copy, I didn’t have high hopes for it. I’ve played the first Deliverance game for a total of 90 hours or so, but never quite got comfortable with its jank nor the fact that it doesn’t run super-well for something that isn’t really great looking. The landscapes and models are all fine, but the textures are quite low resolution and lots of the animations are stiffy and jerky.
So when I read that developer Warhorse Studios was sticking with CryEngine to code the sequel, I was a bit worried that Deliverance 2 would be more of the same. Whereas Unreal Engine, Snowdrop, Id Tech 7, and many others have fully embraced the modern era of hyper-geometry and ray tracing, Crytek’s system is relatively old school in terms of graphics wizardry.
Well, after just a few hours of performance testing, it was obvious that I was worrying about nothing. Sure, screen-space reflections and occlusion don’t look half as good as fully ray-traced surfaces and global illumination, but Deliverance 2 more than makes up for it everywhere else. Best of all, the performance scales very well across all kinds of different PC configurations, from little handheld units, all the way up to 4K monsters.
Rather than trying to shoehorn in as much graphics tech as possible, Warhorse Studios has just worked on improving what the original did well. Forests are vast and luscious, animations are smooth, heck even the skybox looks great. It’s a landscape that begs to be explored (then promptly get lost in and mugged by a bunch of bandits).
The game itself is packed with tiny details that you wouldn’t complain about if they weren’t there, but as soon as you notice them, it makes you wonder why other developers don’t pay as much attention to the little things. For example, if you try to ride your horse under a low bridge or building, there’s a good chance your head will connect with the stonework and doink! You end up on the floor. Silly but brilliant.
Not that there’s anything silly about the game’s performance. How does an average frame rate of 96 fps, with 1% lows of 83 fps, at native 1080p with the High quality preset sound? Good? Bad? Well if I tell you that’s with a Ryzen 5 5600X and an Intel Arc A770, does that change your opinion? Should the above chart not be enough to sway you then check out the video at the top of this article—that’s the same hardware, except at 1440p with FSR 3 Quality.
It certainly altered mine, especially considering how twitchy the latter can be with which games it likes and which it doesn’t. You can grind things down, of course—just slap the resolution up to 4K and apply the ‘Experimental’ quality preset, and an RTX 4080 Super won’t hit 50 fps without upscaling.
However, you don’t have to do this. Deliverance 2 looks pretty good with just the High preset and all praise to the graphics gods, upscaling is entirely optional. When so many games require its use as a minimum, and really don’t look all that much better, I do wonder how many developers are going to look at what Warhorse Studios has done and copy a few notes.
I know of one developer who, while certainly not borrowing any of Warhorse’s ideas, is taking the same approach to graphics tech and performance in its next big game, and I can’t wait to share my findings with you nearer to its launch. (Edit: I’ve now completed a lot more testing of said game and it’s not quite so good as I’d hoped. Ah well.)
While Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Civilization 7 are very different games, and one can’t expect the performance of all three games to be equivalent, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 stands far above them in terms of just how solid and smooth the code runs.
Yes, patches will probably fix all of the issues I experienced during my testing of Rebirth and Civ 7, but with Deliverance 2 being spot on right from the start, Warhorse Studios can concentrate on just making the game better and richer. And that surely must be more cost-effective in terms of time and money than having to fix performance woes.
If the rest of 2025’s big releases are like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, I’ll be a very happy PC gamer.
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