Kingdom Come Deliverance II Performance Benchmark

[W1zzard]

Kingdom Come Deliverance II offers a fantastic RPG experience with impressive attention to details and lots of freedom and immersion. In our performance review, we'll look at the game's graphics quality, VRAM consumption, and how it runs across a range of contemporary graphics cards.

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[dirtyferret]

pretty good performance across many cards

 

[Onasi]

Looks like High is the best compromise between visuals and performance. As is often the case. Can’t say the game looks bad - it’s very clean looking, which is a plus in my books.

 

[Denver]

"Powered by an upgraded version of CryEngine"

Does anyone know why we don't see so many games using CryEngine instead of the regrettable UE5? Is it a matter of complexity in development?

 

[dgianstefani]

"Powered by an upgraded version of CryEngine"

Does anyone know why we don't see so many games using CryEngine instead of the regrettable UE5? Is it a matter of complexity in development?

Old tech comparatively.

 

[heraq]

Looks and runs pretty well it seems, which is quite the novelty these days
I just wish we had more games running on Cryengine instead of UE5

 

[GruiaL]

What happened at 1080p with Upscaling? 5090 getting less FPS than the other ones?

 

[evernessince]

Old tech comparatively.

Tech is but one factor of a game engine. RPG maker is a good example of that, absolutely ancient looking yet used by many small devs because of the ease of use.

In regards to UE5 vs CryEngine it's likely a wide combination of factors. UE5 has more developers and thus more available support articles / examples. UE5 has a large marketplace which is a massive plus. I cannot comment in terms of ease of use between the two as I've never used CryEngine.

Unreal Engine's licensing structure is much more favorable as well, the first $1 million is royalty free. After that it's the same 5% as CryEngine.

There's definitely more that I'll not touch on but it's not like CryEngine has done anything to change the status quo. Their tech is dated now only because they didn't keep up investment into the engine and they didn't do that because they never gained enough traction. The time for them to set aggressively low royalties or seek extra funding to push development was years ago. Now it's going to be very hard to dig themselves out of the hole they are in, assuming they even care.

 

[BoggledBeagle]

I got this game yesterday and I would not describe face animations as natural looking either.

Here is a 3D dog beside a 2D flower:



I find that hard to understand, what is the reason for this?

 

[Cadasiso]

No UE5, smooth frametime graph, simple as that, although it's fair to say the game doesn't have and clearly also doesn't try to have any mind boggling graphics
Weird how even tho VRAM should be leaking with the 4060 Ti 8GB in 4K Quality Upscaling it barely hits the 1% lows and has a similar performance than that seen from the RX 6800, I wonder if it's unloading textures automatically and if it is how noticiably worse the image is

 

[damric]

@W1zzard thank you for the "performance with upscaling" section. Makes it look like my 6900XT can run the game at 4K with some help.

 

[Macro Device]

Makes it look like my 6900XT can run the game at 4K with some help.

My 6700 XT handled it reasonably well at High with FSR Balanced. Your 6900 XT will just nail it.

 

[BoggledBeagle]

Here is a 3D dog beside a 2D flower:

I just fired the game up for the second time now and noticed that even grass and other vegetation is on the planes, you simply cannot look down on the ground. You need to look just straight for the vegetation to look good.

I am starting to think that the flat vegetation is necessary for the good performance on older hardware and consoles. It does not seem that a nicer variant for people with newer hardware is available. Or perhaps it would choke even the most powerful hardware?

Or is it an engine limitation?

 

[dyonoctis]

I got this game yesterday and I would not describe face animations as natural looking either.

Here is a 3D dog beside a 2D flower:

View attachment 383358

I find that hard to understand, what is the reason for this?

Dense vegetation is a bitch. But the Witcher 3 in 2013 got away with low poly flowers. It's not that much of a bitch. It's just another 2020 gaming oddity I guess.

 

[W1zzard]

"Powered by an upgraded version of CryEngine"

Does anyone know why we don't see so many games using CryEngine instead of the regrettable UE5? Is it a matter of complexity in development?

CryEngine is an absolute nightmare to work with, extremely complicated and hard to get the results you want. UE is the exact opposite and there's lots of people available who know how to use it, and there's lots of documentation, and the source code is easily accessible

I wanted to build some simple GPU load, tried Unity, CryEngine, Unreal. Unreal won big time

What happened at 1080p with Upscaling? 5090 getting less FPS than the other ones?

hmm this looks like a testing issue, will retest

 

[Space Lynx]

"Dear Epic, this is how it should be done in Unreal Engine, too." ~W1zzard

 

[bitsandboots]

The visuals comparison is impressive. Just in that "low" isn't bad at all. Yes "Experimental" looks better, but, I'm just impressed at how decent the game would look for low end GPUs.

 

[heraq]

Feels

No UE5, smooth frametime graph, simple as that, although it's fair to say the game doesn't have and clearly also doesn't try to have any mind boggling graphics
Weird how even tho VRAM should be leaking with the 4060 Ti 8GB in 4K Quality Upscaling it barely hits the 1% lows and has a similar performance than that seen from the RX 6800, I wonder if it's unloading textures automatically and if it is how noticiably worse the image is

and they shouldn't, games these days already look good enough, we need developers to focus more on developing actual good and fun games to play instead of chasing shiny graphics

 

[qlum]

End of the day the engine was the right choice for them, team knew how to work cryengine, build their tech on top of that. End result may not be the flashiest but still looks good and performs well.
Even with using Unreal there are definitely performant games, it just requires the right compromises and clear goals / a good effort.

 

[solarmystic]

What happened at 1080p with Upscaling? 5090 getting less FPS than the other ones?

The 3070TI losing to the 2080ti and 3070 is also highly irregular in the 1080p Ultra chart (with no upscaling)

In addition AMD cards are severely under performing (4070TI matching the 7900XTX and the 4070 super beating the 7900 XT at 1080p) in this game which has no forced RT features, lack of driver support perhaps?

 

[theouto]

"Powered by an upgraded version of CryEngine"

Does anyone know why we don't see so many games using CryEngine instead of the regrettable UE5? Is it a matter of complexity in development?

CryEngine has non-existent documentation and a lack of community interest, so if you want to use it then good luck to you.

 

[nguyen]

Looks like RTX 4000 is aging so well vs RDNA3.

KC2 has good amount of players at launch too, let see if that number goes up in the upcoming days

 

[AusWolf]

I prepared for a rough ride with "experimental" settings at 3440x1440 on my 6750 XT... Which never happened. Trying the game actually felt quite smooth. What a surprise!

 

[HughMungus]

Always wondered by my beloved 3080 Ti never gets any place on these graphs. Have to just guesstimate between 3080 and 3090 I guess?

 

[Nostras]

The 3070TI losing to the 2080ti and 3070 is also highly irregular in the 1080p Ultra chart (with no upscaling)


View attachment 383370

In addition AMD cards are severely under performing (4070TI matching the 7900XTX and the 4070 super beating the 7900 XT at 1080p) in this game which has no forced RT features, lack of driver support perhaps?

First thing I noticed as well, the AMD cards are underperforming big time. Big shoutout to W1zzard as well for providing an easily digestible image that shows the trend.
7700XT especially performs incredibly poor, only the 7600 looks somewhat in line with Nvidia cards.

I do hope AMD addresses this sometime because if this trend continues we should seriously re-evaluate the performance of AMD cards and their value.

@W1zzard will you add the B580 as well?