Kingdom Come Deliverance Hd Textures Dlc

[Amabella Batton]

Beautifulthat would be the one word summary I have for the graphics of Kingdom Come: Deliverance. They are not perfect, and I will describe some of the imperfections, but this is a game one can stop in and just look around, enjoying the views and landscapes. Not everything looks as good when viewed close up, but it seems that standard methods are used to make it look as good as any open world game.

Starting with the environment, the vegetation does a very good job of keeping the world from looking flat, unless of course the world is supposed to be flat there. It covers the ground well and waves in the breeze with only close inspection revealing any issues with it. Mainly this is an issue with seeing the defects in the textures, as it does appear textures with transparency are used to keep the number of polygons down, a tactic many games use. Also the ground textures contain many elements to augment the three dimensional vegetation above it, and if you are ever walking around trying to find arrows that missed their mark (and you will miss a lot early on) you will notice this. (By the way, those arrows blend in very well with the grass, which can be rather annoying.)

What truly makes the environment shine though is the sun, and I am not decided if that is an intentional pun or not because the statement is very accurate. The lighting effects that come with the sun shining through trees I find very beautiful. Flares and light rays pull my eyes to it very strongly and I am happy to look at them, but there is more to see than that. The sights of forest covered hills in the distance or towns and castles standing out in clear patches are equally worth looking at. At night the world can be just as worthy of stopping and looking around, to look at the moon, the stars, and cities glowing near the horizon from the torches still burning.

Before moving away from talking about the environment, I want to mention that I cannot think of a game that has given me a better example of normal mapping. At one point when looking at a stone wall I thought tessellation might be in play, to give the shadow details necessary for all of the stones to pop out from the wall like they appeared to. Coming closer and looking at it from the side, the wall is almost completely flat, so all of that shadow detail is thanks to a normal map doing a wonderful job.

At a distance, much looks wonderful and closer up some does as well, but not everything. Though it did not stand out to me at first, eventually I became aware of how many of the NPCs share models, which do not look bad but do not stand out either. The named NPCs however do look good. On occasion I did notice the face animations not perfectly aligning with what they are saying, and some canned animations for Henry, but it is hard to find much fault here.

Most of the time the view you have of Henry is just of his hands and arms, as this is a first-person game, and they look at least good enough to not complain. You will notice how the amount of dirt on his clothing and armor can greatly impact his appearance, taking away the shine of the metal plates and making you want to clean it off.

Speaking of his clothing and armor, Kingdom Come: Deliverance does suffer from something likely all games that will dress their characters with selected gear do: clipping between items. Not every combination can be covered and physics cannot be applied to every motion, so you will find, on Henry and on NPCs, hands and limbs clipping through clothing, and even the clothing clipping through objects. It is pretty much par for the course though, so not something I will hold against it.

Another spot you will notice clipping, and potentially other issues, is at the grinding wheel. Item durability is something you will need to deal with in this game, and for many weapons you can take them to a grinding wheel to sharpen them. You will need to play with the angle the blade is pressed against the stone at, and for some angles this means the blade is within the stone, but chances are when that happens, you are damaging the blade, not sharpening it. Under some lighting conditions, the shadow cast by the weapon on the wheel will break apart, so instead of being a nice gradient, it has clear lines to it, which was never appealing to look at. The way you know if you are sharpening the blade is if sparks are being produced, and this effect is definitely canned, and in some cases I think it might have glitched as the lighting was present, but the sparks were not. This happened rarely, but did happen. What will happen more often is you will see the texture for blood vanish, square by square as you grind it away, because that is how you clean swords and axes in this game. Transforming the edge of a blade from damaged to sharpened just has the damage fade away, so not a particularly advanced transformation, but it gets the job done well enough.

I do like mentioning how fluids are handled when I can, and I am pretty well satisfied here. Water reacts very nicely, with steps causing ripples that travel out quickly and pretty far (perhaps too far for reality, but I prefer to have it than not). Fire is actually something I did not look at too much. You will go around with a torch at night, but it is held just outside of the default field of view, so I did not so notice it there. Whenever I did look at a fire burning, yes it looked like canned animation and did not offer much depth, but I rarely thought about it.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance has a good number of graphics options, but there is one missing that proved an issue for me at first. You see the way I typically I figure out the optimal settings to play at is to start reasonably high and then watch the Steam FPS counter to see how far away I am from 60 FPS, but the game initially was capped at 60 FPS. The game does not actually have a frame rate cap, but V-Sync was enabled and I believe it uses double-buffering, both because of the 60 FPS limit and because of the difference I found in the data between when a frame was rendered and displayed. (The difference was typically two to three refresh cycles later, which would make sense with double buffering adding one cycle of latency, and then Desktop Windows Manager added another layer of double buffering, as I played in borderless window.) There is no in-game option to disable V-Sync, sadly, but disabling it is easy enough.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance uses Cryengine and it accepts various options as launch flags, but the developers offer a better solution than messing around with shortcuts or Steam launch parameters. If you go to the game's directory you will see a system.cfg file, which you do not want to edit. Just make a new file named user.cfg in the same folder and put whatever options you want there. These will override the built-in defaults and the default options set in the other file. To disable V-sync have a line that says r_VSync=0. My file says more than that, as I also set the maximum FPS to 300, just to be safe (sys_MaxFPS=300) and added an option that can help performance on some GPUs, including my RX Vega 64.

Unfortunately the documentation I have been able to find does not give me enough information to know what is going on, and I do not know any Cryengine developers I could ask. The option is r_BatchType and by default it is set to 0, which is "CPU Friendly," if you look in the Cryengine documentation. On at least some AMD GPUs, changing the option to 1, which is "GPU Friendly" can produce a nice performance boost. I did do some experimenting with this option (which you can also alter in-game through the console, along with others) but will not be presenting any performance data on it; only my anecdotal experience with it. I just feel this is a bit too much a change to be fair to do in a review, though changing the V-Sync setting I think is fair. While the performance boost was nice and welcome, it also varied from location to location, but it is enough that I hope either the developers will find a way to implement the optimizations it brings, or that you can find the time to experiment with it yourself, to see if it helps. From some of the reports I have seen, NVIDIA GPUs do not benefit from the change as much, or might see performance drop.

If I do a performance analysis, I will look into this option more deeply, but I cannot commit to doing such an analysis currently. While largely the game behaved nicely, I did also suffer from a number of crashes, including my system hard locking and my GPU bugging out and running at its maximum P-state all the time, requiring a restart. These issues are not necessarily directly related to the game itself but could be the result of some unfortunate software interaction taking place on my computer, but it is still true these issues have only occurred while I played the game. As it is I prefer to wait to do a performance analysis, until driver updates and game patches can mature, so perhaps by the time I would start a performance analysis they will be resolved, but I do not want to commit to it just the same.

So that is a lot of writing without me talking about the settings. I played at the Very High preset, which is only behind the Ultra High preset, and I also turned off motion blur as a personal choice. Every other option I left according to the preset.

I wish I could give a strong a clear statement as to how the game performed, but I cannot. Largely the performance was good, but it varied a lot, and I am not entirely sure of the cause. If it only happened in or near populated cities, I could say it is the CPU having a hard time keeping up, and while some cities saw the performance drop, not all did, and there were times when not near a city the performance fell. I would like to predict this situation will improve as optimizations are developed and put in place, but because I cannot strongly guess at the cause, I cannot say if I think it will be fixed.

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