Kingdom Come Deliverance suffers from poor performance across all consoles, even if Xbox One X has resolution advantage - report
Picking a clear "best" platform for Kingdom Come Deliverance is not easy, at least when you take PC out of the equation.
The launch of Kingdom Come Deliverance has not exactly been smooth. With a 23GB day one patch, multiplayer reported bugs and performance issues, Deliverance's sometimes photorealistic look has been overshadowed by its technical struggles.
Although the game does support PS4 Pro, and Xbox One X, bringing enhancements to both, a new report from Digital Foundry reveals that things are not as clean cut as you'd hope.
To start with, the report points out that graphical aspects like texture resolution, shadow quality, texture filtering, and motion blur are identical across all consoles, and they're not great at that.
This parity carries over to Kingdom Come Deliverance's shortcomings as well, as the report notes many instances of visible pop-in across all consoles, seen in dense towns and in more open environments. Switching between low and higher resolution textures is a common occurrence, according to the report.
The resolution across the four consoles is among the biggest discriminators. Base PS4, and Xbox One get 1600x900, though PS4 gets a slight improvement in ambient occlusion.
PS4 Pro ups the ante to a full 1080p, and pushes the quality of ambient occlusion farther. Xbox One X is on top with a 2560x1440 resolution, but ambient occlusion is not upgraded in the same way, and ends up somewhere between PS4 and PS4 Pro.
One other area where the Xbox One X excels is in load times, which come in at 53 seconds compared to 2 or 1.5 minutes seen on other consoles.
Performance is given a similar boost on PS4 Pro, and Xbox One X, but the advantage is not that big considering the state all consoles are in. All four have frame-pacing issues, according to the report, which it notes is a result of capping the frame-rate at 31fps instead of 30. Frame-pacing issues incur stutter, and that's true in this case.
Big open areas and busy cities generally produce the worst results, and base PS4, and Xbox One are equal in this regard, trading blows in the different scenarios. Drops can be as low as 20fps, and sometimes 17fps on Xbox One.
Although PS4 Pro, and Xbox One X fare better and keep closer to the frame-rate target, drops to the lower 20s do still happen. Xbox One X comes out on top overall, thanks to its upgraded resolution and shorter load times, but no one platform is a clear winner.
