Conclusion

Dishonored 2 is a worthy sequel to Dishonored and provides great gameplay centered around an immersive storyline. The new Void game engine (DirectX 11), which is based on id software's RAGE engine, is a decent upgrade over Unreal Engine 3. Even so, I still find the graphics slightly dated, even though important modern rendering techniques have been added. Some levels have rather poor visuals, but other places, like cities, look very good, with remarkable vistas as far as your eyes can see. The game also does a good job with world building and immersion through little details spread throughout the city, with Karnaca feeling alive and complex. Performance varies wildly: While you might run a nice 70 FPS in one part of the map, just turning around or walking for a few seconds can cut framerates in half, which will be perceived as lag or stuttering. Texture pop-in has been a problem with the RAGE engine, but in Dishonored 2, it is barely noticeable on an SSD-powered system.

It's good to see plenty of PC graphics options included in the settings - especially no FPS cap and FOV, which are a must for any serious PC title, are nice to have.

Rendering performance on NVIDIA graphics cards is OK. However, it is slightly worse than what I would have expected based on the graphics presented. AMD cards, on the other hand, suffer from bad performance when compared to their NVIDIA counterparts; the RX 480, for example, matches the GTX 1060 3 GB even though it should either place somewhere between the GTX 1060 3 GB and 6 GB or closer toward the 6 GB version. AMD's just-released 16.11.3 driver does not change that. I even retested all AMD cards with it and saw no performance improvement over 16.11.2. Both AMD and NVIDIA powered systems suffer from various intensities of lag when moving around in city areas, which seems to indicate that there is still some potential for Bethesda to optimize performance.