The difference between life and death, victory and defeat, glory and misery, is as thin as your shadow, as sharp as your blade, as swift as your horse.The world is crumbling, and the spoils of its fall are at hand for men and women with wits, ambition and battle skills — people such as you. Your destiny is yours to decide. 

Will you find glory and write your name in the history of Calradia?

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord will build upon the Mount & Blade franchise bringing in many exciting and highly requested new features (such as multiplayer) and moving forward by greatly expanding gameplay in all areas and offering much improved visuals.

Set 200 years before the events of Warband, in Bannerlord we find the Calradic Empire on the brink of collapse. Assaulted on several fronts by external enemies, and consumed by civil war, the empire that once dominated the continent is on the brink of collapse -- the new order that emerges from its ashes may depend on your actions and decisions! 

Set during the collapse of a once mighty empire, players are challenged to establish their clan and climb their way to the upper echelons of a medieval society through warfare, trade, and political dealings. Gather troops, raise an army, and command and fight alongside them in epic, large scale, real-time battles and sieges. 

TaleWorlds Entertainment announces the release of the Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord benchmark tool, aimed at testing CPU and GPU powers in a balanced and stable environment. Rather than having a constant GPU bound as many other benchmarks, in this tool the CPU and GPU workloads are balanced, allowing for a proper testing of gaming performance of modern CPU’s.

The Bannerlord benchmark tool consists of a single scripted combat scene, with two massive armies pitted against each other. Although the number of soldiers is maxed at 1,000 for now, it can be lowered in the game settings (under Performance / Gameplay / Battle Size). The scripted scene follows the same camera path and troop movements, which allows for a stabler testing environment -- but other elements, like the strategy AI of both sides, individual agents, and formations aren’t scripted: 1,000 troops on ground, their formations, and their mounts making constant AI decisions, on top of the physics involved in every projectile trajectory, hits, and collusions.

With animations, render parts and other CPU related functionalities added to the mix, the Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord benchmark tools can put even high-end CPU and GPU to the test, while making sure the differences in performance with regular gaming sessions are minimal. Thanks to this, this benchmark tool can be essential to compare performance in gaming CPUs. When it comes to GPU, though, what makes this benchmark ideal are its large-scale battles, with a high amount of detailed assets and models. Running the benchmark in Ultra settings in 4K is the best possible tool to test GPU-bound scenarios.

The Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord tool provides an FPS graph and some other basic information which can be helpful for users when setting their game -- but more advanced testers can check a log of frame times

Currently, the benchmark provides an FPS graph and some other basic information which will be helpful for users when setting their game. But for more enthusiast testers, a log of frame times is written in a file along with your chosen settings.

Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord is currently in Early Access, available on Steam, Epic Games Store and GOG.com.

Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord is slated for release on PC and consoles as digital download and in retail stores all over the globe.