Conclusion

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is not that unsimilar to The Witcher 3 or Skyrim, maybe with the exception of there being no dungeons, dragons or magic. Rather, the game tries to be a somewhat realistic "middle-ages simulator"; you start out as a lowly son of a blacksmith who has no idea how to properly use a sword, which way to point a bow, or how to work a lockpick. Throughout the course of the game, your skills do improve, and this will quickly teach you how miserable people were in the middle ages. The gameplay also requires you to keep track of mundane tasks, such as eating or sleeping, or your abilities will be reduced. I've played about 15 hours of the game and have to say I love it - its immersion factor is incredible, better than on most other competing games. While some reviewers have complained about "tons of bugs", I've yet to find anything that's serious. Sure, some small bugs exist, but they are not game stoppers and mostly cosmetic.

Warhorse Studio picked Crytek's CryEngine to power Kingdom Come: Deliverance, presenting good visuals using the DirectX 11 API. While the graphics are good, they are not stunning for 2018. Textures could be of higher resolution, and some models could be more richly detailed, too. The clunky character animations, which are motion captures, also show that Warhorse is not a huge studio with unlimited funds, but all that can't distract from the mesmerizing gameplay. VRAM usage of the game is modest due to the relatively low texture resolution (even at Ultra).

Basically any modern graphics card will have enough graphics memory for it not to be an issue (3-4 GB). Graphics performance requirements are very high: for 1080p 60 FPS, you'll need a GTX 1070, and 4K 60 FPS isn't gonna happen with a single card; a GTX 1080 Ti gets you around 35 FPS. The game does support SLI according to the developer, though, so GTX 1080 Ti SLI will get you those magic 60 FPS @ 4K. In our first test scene, we saw surprisingly bad performance results from AMD Vega specifically, which seems to be some kind of architectural or driver-performance issue since other cards (including Polaris) are not affected. After picking a benchmark scene that's more representative of typical gameplay, Vega does much better, and the RX Vega 64 actually manages to beat the GTX 1080 in 4K performance.

We also tested multi-core CPU performance scaling at various settings and are happy to report that the game is able to make proper use of many cores. What we also noticed is that the game really uses a lot of CPU power, as FPS goes down quickly on configurations with fewer cores/threads. For solid gameplay, I'd recommend a quad-core CPU (can be without HT). If you have a weaker CPU, tweak the graphics settings because reduced settings will reduce the CPU load required to render each frame.

In closing, I have to admit that I'm genuinely surprised by the excellent immersive gameplay of Kingdom Come: Deliverance and hope that the developer finds time to add more polish to the game, which it needs to appeal to the masses so that commercial success can follow.