Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

Hardware reviewers point to Kingdom Come: Deliverance II as an unusually clean, well-optimized benchmark title. TechSpot described testing it as "a breath of fresh air," noting that it is built on CryEngine (a rarity among modern releases), loads in seconds, has no shader-compilation stutter, and no traversal stutter, which makes it a very repeatable and reliable test subject compared to the many Unreal Engine games that stutter or take minutes to load. DSOGaming similarly called it "one of the most optimized PC games of 2025," praising how cleanly it scales across a wide range of hardware through its in-game presets.

It is valuable as a raster (non-ray-traced) benchmark because it does not force ray tracing. TechSpot notes the game has no mandatory RT effects (its lighting comes from CryEngine's SVOGI global illumination) and that this design lets a huge span of GPUs each playable frame rates without upscaling being mandatory. Because flagship GPUs are not artificially capped at ~100 fps, the game spreads results across the entire GPU stack, from entry-level cards up to the RTX 5090, which makes it good for differentiating hardware tiers. DSOGaming, however, cautions against overhyping it as proof that RT is unneeded, arguing its visuals show SSR artifacts and pop-in and don't match path-traced titles.

It is also cited as a strong CPU test. DSOGaming was struck that, despite CryEngine's historically poor CPU threading, KCD2 has "amazing multi-core CPU support" and is one of the best multi-threaded games on PC, making it useful for CPU-scaling comparisons. On the memory side, TechSpot found the game is not especially VRAM-hungry: even at the Ultra preset an 8GB card is fine, and the 8GB and 16GB RTX 4060 Ti performed identically throughout their testing.

On vendor behavior, both outlets observed that the game currently favors Nvidia hardware. TechSpot found Nvidia GPUs leading their AMD counterparts at each tier (e.g., the RX 7900 XTX only matching an RTX 4070 Ti at some points), and DSOGaming measured the RTX 5080 as roughly 35-48% faster than the RX 7900 XTX. Both note DLSS and FSR upscaling are supported but that there is no frame generation.