Livescore
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is quite a looker. And for a AAA game coming out in 2025, Warhorse Studio’s medieval RPG aces in the optimization department from the get-go with the right graphics settings.
While it’s above my paygrade to talk about how their decision to stick with CryEngine (as opposed to the likes of Unreal Engine 5) might have paid dividends on this front, I can lay out which specific settings are performance hogs and which ones are performant. That being said, your mileage may vary in terms of balancing your desired visual fidelity and framerate. After all, there is no one-size-fits-all for graphics settings with the wide gamut of PC hardware among users.
I tested the game on a system with AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, 32GB DDR4 RAM, and a good ol’ Nvidia GTX 1080 on a 1080p 144Hz Monitor. Here are my recommended settings after fiddling with the presets and customizing the individual settings in the beginning section of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.
Our recommended graphics settings for Kingdom Come Deliverance 2
Graphics Settings
- Resolution: Your monitor’s resolution
- Window Mode: Fullscreen
- Overall image quality: Custom
- Show FPS: Personal preference
- VSync: Off
Note (click for drop-down):
If you are experiencing screen tearing, you can turn VSync on at the cost of some added input latency.
- Frame rate limit: Your monitor’s max refresh rate (for example, 144hz)
- Gamma correction: Personal preference
- Horizontal FOV: 95
- Technology: DLSS
Note:
Set this to FSR for AMD or NVIDIA GTX GPU users. For Intel GPU owners, XeSS isn’t available at the time of the game’s launch, and the devs haven’t mentioned whether it’ll be added in the future. If you have a powerful enough graphics card for your resolution, you can try turning it off too since the game is not reliant on upscaling to deliver good framerate.
Note:
If you are struggling with FPS, I’d start out with setting this set to Balanced before tweaking anything else.
- Sharpness: Personal preference
- Motion Blur: Off
- Near DOF: Off
Advanced Graphics Settings
Note:
Bumping this to Ultra isn’t too noticeable in moment-to-moment gameplay, so isn’t worth the performance cost.
Note:
High and Ultra tanked my FPS near fires and smokes. Medium seems like the best-performing choice.
Note:
The quality jump from Medium to High is visible enough to compensate for the minor FPS cost.
- Global Illumination: Medium
Note:
High/Ultra is a performance hog here, but the visual improvement is easily tangible. I’d suggest bumping this up a notch if you have some FPS to spare.
- Postprocessing Quality: Low
Note:
I didn’t notice any eye-candy being lost from setting this all the way to Low, but the FPS gain is palpable on this one.
- Shader Quality: Medium
- Shadows: Medium
Note:
The shadows shimmer somewhat less on High and Ultra, but the performance cost didn’t seem to be worth it.
Note:
If you are running a GPU with 8GB or more VRAM, High setting seems like the obvious choice. I didn’t notice any stutters (at least that we usually associate with VRAM-limited scenarios) on my 8GB GPU on 1080p. If you have a GPU with 12GB or more VRAM, Ultra is the way to go.
- Volumetric Effects Detail: Medium
Note:
This setting is, again, a performance hog on High and Ultra, while Low makes the game look noticeably dull.
- Vegetation Detail: Medium
- Character Detail: High
If you are struggling with FPS in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, it’s always a good idea to first check whether your PC meets the minimum system requirements for the game. Next, I’d suggest checking if your graphics card driver is up to date. Here are the links for the latest Nvidia, AMD, and Intel driver downloads.
As evident with the game running mighty fine on my nine-year-old GTX 1080, it very well seems like any decent gaming PC built in the last decade will be able to run KCD 2 (albeit not at 4K Ultra; for that, you’d need something in the ballpark of an RTX 4080). And it’s not often we can say that regarding AAA releases in this day and age.
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