A Total War Saga: TROY is the latest Total War game that came exclusively on Epic Games Store a couple of days ago. Thus, it’s time now to benchmark it and see how this new strategy game performs on the PC platform.
For this PC Performance Analysis, we used an Intel i9 9900K with 16GB of DDR4 at 3600Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX580 and RX Vega 64, NVIDIA’s RTX 2080Ti, GTX980Ti and GTX690. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce driver 451.67 and the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.8.1 drivers. NVIDIA has not added any SLI profile for this game, meaning that our GTX690 performed similarly to a single GTX680.
Similarly to all previous Total War games, Creative Assembly has included a lot of graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Textures, Shadows, Water, Terrain, Ambient Occlusion and more.
A Total War Saga: TROY comes with three build-in benchmarks. After running them, we found the most demanding one to be the battle benchmark. Thus, we’ve decided to use that one for our PC Performance Analysis. We’ve also lowered our resolution to 720p for our CPU benchmarks (in order to avoid any GPU bottleneck).
In order to find out how the game scales on multiple CPU threads, we simulated a dual-core, a quad-core and a hexa-core CPU. And, surprisingly enough, the dual-core system was able to provide a constant 30fps experience on Ultra settings. All our other systems have no trouble at all pushing a constant 60fps experience.
While A Total War Saga: TROY uses DirectX 11, it can run smoothly even on older generation CPUs. Our Intel i7 4930K was able to run the game smoothly at 1080p and Ultra settings. At 1440p, we saw some minor drops below 60fps. Moreover, we saw a 10fps performance difference between the i7 4930K and the i9 9900K in that particular resolution.
Given the fact that the game can run on a wide range of CPUs, we can safely classify A Total War Saga: TROY as a GPU-bound title. However, it appears that this particular game performs horribly on AMD’s hardware. At 1080p/Ultra, the only GPU that was able to push a constant 60fps experience was the RTX2080Ti. At this point, we should note that the Ultra settings force 4xMSAA. Thus, we’ve also benchmarked the Ultra settings without MSAA (but with FXAA).
At 1080p/Ultra/FXAA, our top three GPUs were able to offer a constant 60fps experience. Still, it’s really disappointing witnessing the Vega 64 performing similarly to the GTX980Ti. AMD will have to work with Creative Assembly in order to further optimize this game – via post-launch patches and new drivers – for its GPUs.
At 1440p/Ultra settings, the RTX2080Ti was the only GPU capable of offering a smooth gaming experience. Again, the Vega 64 offered a similar performance to the GTX980Ti. As for 4K, NVIDIA’s most powerful GPU was able to push a minimum of 32fps and an average of 40fps. When we replaced 4xMSAA with FXAA, we were able to get a minimum of 54fps and an average of 62fps in 4K/Ultra.
Graphics wise, A Total War Saga: TROY looks great. There are a lot of modern-day effects (like Godrays and Screen-space reflections) and the game offers a lot of units on screen (which is its biggest feature). Every unit is detailed (at least when it comes to strategy games) and everything looks like a Total War game. I also noticed some cool soft-smoke particles, as well as great amount of foliage.
All in all, and despite the fact that the game only uses DX11, A Total War Saga: TROY runs smoothly on the PC platform. By replacing 4xMSAA with FXAA, PC gamers can run its Ultra settings on GPUs equivalent to the GTX980Ti. The game can also run smoothly on older generation CPUs. Not only that, but there are A LOT of graphics settings to tweak. The only downside here is that AMD’s GPUs under-perform on this . Therefore, let’s hope that the red team will further optimize its drivers.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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The Total War community spent years complaining about the Warscape engine which was build in 2008 for Empire Total War. But they upgraded it to 64 bit for the first Warhammer game and the engine since then has been fairly good in terms of performance, Warhammer 2 uses the same iteration of it, while 3Kingdoms has it’s own version.
Total War veterans remember Rome 2 was broken literally for years, CA denied any issues the whole time and then quietly released a performance patch which fixed Rome 2 and allowed the engine to utilize multiple cores properly, wherein prior to that the campaign map would just stress out the first core while the others sat idle. Atilla however was never given that same performance patch and continues to be the black sheep in the series in terms of overall playability due to massive performance issues.
The Troy Saga game uses the Warhammer version of Warscape but underneath the hood, all the TW games all still running a 12 year old graphics/game engine which needs to be scrapped and a new one rebuilt if they want to step into new gen gaming. The main reason is not so much performance, it’s the fact the engine has never been able to give us proper Melee battles because it was designed for Gunpowder action which is why it works so well in Warhammer.
It also has a notorious reputation throughout all the games for atrocious siege AI and pathfinding issues, and since there’s no physics involved within the engine itself it has never given us anything consistent in terms of weight and physics based realism you’re supposed to see when a bunch of units clash with each other. That’s a huge issue within the TW community, and modders have been trying forever to solve some of these melee issues but to no avail, the engine itself is just not built for it.
I doubt any game studio wants to spend money and time building a new engine, it’s a money thing, but this one is WAY overdue for a retirement, 12 years in the tech world is an eternity!
agreed. great post.
Faster single core performance is a must for PC only games. ARMA 3, DCS World, Total War, they all have a CPU bottleneck and no true multi-core support.
what a joke that crap graphics can be so demading… fast and furious crossroads (the evil as a game) seems almost new gen compared to this in terms of graphics engine…
I can see some textuers from ROME 2. I hate this crapy engine, all TW games from ROME 2 to this are looking the same to me.
I wonder if it as much the engine as just really bad art design/artists at this point.
>GTX 970 in the recommended specs
Not have stable 60fps even on GTX 1080ti. Perfectly optimized game.