Best Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Settings for FPS (PC Optimization Guide)

The best Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 settings for FPS are Vegetation Quality Medium, Shadows High, Object and Character Detail Medium, Global Illumination Medium, and DLSS/FSR enabled — Vegetation and Shadows are the two heaviest settings, so those trims recover the most frames. KCD2 is a well-optimized CryEngine open-world RPG that mainly rewards smart draw-distance and upscaling choices rather than blanket “everything low.” Here is the full optimized configuration.

Quick optimized settings table

Start here, then fine-tune for your hardware. These values target a smooth, high-FPS experience while keeping the game looking close to Ultra.

Setting	Recommended	Why
Upscaling (DLSS/FSR)	Native AA (1080p) / Quality (1440p–4K)	Biggest single FPS gain, minimal visual loss
Vegetation Quality	Medium	Heaviest setting — huge cost in forests/towns
Shadows	High	Second-heaviest; High ≈ Ultra visually
Global Illumination	Medium	Large gain for a small visual change
Object Quality	Medium	Controls object draw distance (CPU cost)
Character Detail	Medium	Controls NPC draw distance (CPU cost in crowds)
Textures	High / Ultra	Almost free if you have the VRAM
Texture Filtering	High	Cheap, sharpens ground/distant detail
Water Detail	Medium	Noticeable cost, minor visual change
Effects / Particles	High	Modest cost
Frame Generation	Off unless base FPS > 60	Adds latency at low base rates

The settings that actually move your FPS

KCD2’s cost is concentrated in a handful of options. Spend your quality budget on textures (which are nearly free) and pull back on the expensive ones.

Vegetation Quality — your biggest lever

Vegetation is the most demanding setting in the game. It controls foliage density and how far grass, bushes, and trees render, and forests and town outskirts are exactly where frames drop. Set it to Medium for a large gain with little visual difference during actual play; drop to Low only if you still need frames.

Shadows — High, not Ultra

Shadows are the second-heaviest setting. High is visually near-identical to Ultra and costs meaningfully less. There is almost never a reason to run Ultra shadows in this game.

Object Quality and Character Detail — draw distance is CPU work

These two govern how far objects and NPCs render at full detail. Because KCD2 is CPU-bound in dense areas like Kuttenberg, pushing them to Ultra forces the CPU to render crowds and props at distance, tanking your 1% lows. Medium keeps scenes looking full while lifting your minimum frame rate — the number that determines how smooth the game feels.

Global Illumination — Medium is the value pick

GI on Medium looks close to higher presets during normal play and recovers a solid chunk of GPU headroom.

Textures — keep them high

Textures barely affect frame rate as long as you have enough VRAM. On 8 GB cards, High is safe at 1080p/1440p; drop Texture Resolution one notch only if you see VRAM-related stutter.

Upscaling: the essential setting

Enable DLSS (NVIDIA RTX), FSR (AMD or older cards), or XeSS. KCD2’s upscaling delivers roughly a 30–60% performance uplift with little visual loss, and at 1080p you should run Native AA / DLAA — it uses the upscaler purely as a superior anti-aliasing pass at full resolution. At 1440p and 4K, Quality mode is the sweet spot. Pick the right upscaler for your GPU with our DLSS vs FSR vs XeSS comparison.

Only turn on Frame Generation once your real frame rate is already above ~60 FPS — below that it adds noticeable input latency. See frame generation and input lag for the trade-off.

System-level tuning (do these once)

Graphics settings are half the job. These system tweaks lift KCD2 specifically:

• 24–32 GB RAM. This game is unusually RAM-hungry — 16 GB causes 1% low stutter at high settings. Run your kit at rated speed with XMP/EXPO.
• Install on an SSD to eliminate streaming stutter and texture pop-in.
• Clean-install your GPU driver with DDU and keep it current.
• Disable VBS for a free CPU-bound FPS gain, set a high-performance power plan, and enable GPU scheduling (HAGS).
• Cap your FPS for consistent frame times — a steady 60 feels smoother than a fluctuating 75.

Display and latency

For the lowest input lag, run Fullscreen rather than borderless — see fullscreen vs borderless vs windowed. Then squeeze out system-level responsiveness with the timer resolution guide and how to minimize input delay.

Still stuttering?

If you get hitches rather than a low average frame rate, that is a separate problem — shader compilation, the Bluetooth-peripheral bug, or storage. Our dedicated Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 stuttering fix walks through each cause.