Introduction

Kingdom Come: Deliverance, by debuting Czech developer Warhorse Studios and published by Deep Silver ("STALKER" and "Homefront"), aspires to be this year's first AAA blockbuster. The action RPG set in medieval central Europe, the Holy Roman Empire, follows the story of Henry, a carefree Bohemian sleepy-village hero out to take vengeance on a Cuman raiding party that ravages his home.

The richly detailed storyline has several political and religious overtones as the various sub-plots and side quests reveal themselves, some of which is relevant social commentary for this time. The game has a first-rate production design powered by CryEngine. We know from games such as "Ryse: Son of Rome" that in the right hands, the engine rewards high-end hardware with spectacular eye candy for games in a historic setting. On the PC, Kingdom Come: Deliverance requires 64-bit Windows and uses DirectX 11.

In this review, we put Kingdom Come: Deliverance through our selection of graphics cards backed by the latest drivers on our VGA test system. We measure the game's performance across four screen resolutions and even test the game's multi-core CPU performance scaling.

Screenshots

Graphics Settings

• The first settings screen deals with monitor settings, like resolution and fullscreen/windowed/borderless
• You can also select from a bunch of predefined quality presets here, which is typical for CryEngine games. This can be customized further in advanced settings
• It's nice to see an option to show the in-game FPS
• Field of View can be adjusted between 60/65/70/75, which is a bit limited, especially 75 seems too low for many setups.
• What's missing here is an option to enable or disable V-Sync. You can set this via the developer console (tilde key, left to the 1 key) and type r_vsync 0. Alternatively, you can set it through command line arguments "+r_vsync 0".

• In advanced settings, details can be adjusted per rendering category.
• Draw distances, even at the Ultra settings, are not set to the highest, so you can improve quality beyond Ultra here if you have the graphics power.
• Most people hate motion blur, you can easily turn it off here