Kingdom Come Deliverance on PC offers huge upgrades over console
Having taken a close look at all four console builds of Kingdom Come Deliverance, one thing is clear - this is a highly demanding game built on an engine that traditionally favours PC hardware. Xbox One X comes out on top with improved performance and a 1440p resolution, but frame-rate dips to the low 20fps region on all versions, with long initial loading times and abundant pop-in across the board. The good news is that the PC version solves a number of those problems, provided you have sufficiently capable hardware. Yes, perhaps not surprisingly, bearing in mind the CryEngine roots, this game can push even the most powerful kit to its limits.
It's also a great example of a game that benefits immensely from running from solid state storage. The console versions take anything from 53 seconds (Xbox One X) to almost two minutes (PS4) to complete their initial loads. On PC, the experience is transformed. Blink and you'll miss it: within one second, you're at the front-end menu. From there, it does take five seconds to actually load a save game to the opening village - but again, that's a huge saver on the 28 second wait on an Xbox One X, or 44 seconds on a base PS4. And this is from a mainstream SATA Sandisk SSD, not a cutting-edge NVMe drive.
As you may expect, solving the console's performance issues is very much down to individual settings and hardware, but the good news is that Kingdom Come Deliverance is built to scale - not just on today's technology, but tomorrow's GPUs too. In terms of CPU requirements, simulation is pushed hard here, with the title delivering an open world design similar to Homefront The Revolution, but pushed to the next level with dense forests and complex AI-driven cities.
Post a Comment