Total War Saga: Troy is the latest entry after the now 20-year stretch of Total War games. The Total War series has undergone many transitions to keep up with the times, but they really have remained in their hearts a lot a well made RTS, and in the present times that is very welcome. If you’re wondering why Chris thought this game was worth a headline of 9/10 after his review. But, if you’re here, you’re probably wondering how the game works.
Total War Story: Troy has been fairly well received after being handed over the first 24 hours of its release window in the Epic Games Store. But how well will your hardware receive it? TTS: Troy is powered by the Total War Engine 3 (Warscape) Engine, the same engine that powers the latest entry in Total War, Three Kingdoms. Total War doubled with DirectX 12 back in the last Warhammer series, but have since gone back to a DirectX 11 exclusively for their rendering API, disappointing for a game that may have so many characters on the screen.
Test method
Total War Story: Troy comes with the typical array of presets, ranging from Low to Ultra with even more settings to customize the Ultra setting for those crazy enough to strive for. Fortunately, the game has a built-in benchmarking utility that gives you the chance to test the game’s performance across three different scenarios. Ultra preset is the name of the game here in this test because we really want to put the screws on everything and see if this game could be executed at the Ultra preset and we found it much harder than expected. We chose to go with the Battle Scene because it was the absolute most decent of the three and is representative of a scenario where your framerate stability would mean the most, the heat of battle. We recorded the 90-second benchmark three times with results using FrameView.
Just a note, the Battle benchmark included in the game (the one we used) will yield the lowest performance numbers, typically around 60% for the performance figures provided by the other two benchmarks. So if you find yourself relatively much higher performing, then check which benchmark you are running.
Once we had the results of 3 runes, after putting away an initial burner run for loading purposes, we took the average of average frame rates as the 1% percentile results of the run. We report our performance metrics as average frames per second and have moved from the 1% and .1% reporting and now use the 1% percentile. For those who are not sure what the 1% percentage is, compensation is easily explained as only 1 frame out of 100 is slower than this frame rate. Put another way, 99% of the frames will reach at least this frame rate.
Ultra preset settings
Test system
| Components | X570 |
|---|---|
| CPU | Ryzen 9 3900X 4.3GHz All Core Lock (disable one CCD for 3600X results) |
| Memories | 32GB Hyper X Predator DDR4 3600 |
| Motherboard | ASUS TUF Gaming X570 Plus WiFi |
| Storage | TeamGroup Cardea 1TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 |
| PSU | Cooler Master V1200 Platinum |
| Windows Version | Latest version of windows at the time of testing |
| Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling | Powered by GPU and driver. |
Test graphics cards
| GPU | Architecture | Core Count | Clock speed | Memory capacity | Memory speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA RTX 2080ti FE | Turing | 4352 | 1350/1635 | 11GB GDDR6 | 14Gbps |
| NVIDIA RTX 2080 SUPER FE | Turing | 3072 | 1650/1815 | 8GB GDDR6 | 15.5Gbps |
| NVIDIA RTX 2070 SUPER FE | Turing | 2560 | 1605/1770 | 8GB GDDR6 | 14Gbps |
| NVIDIA RTX 2060 SUPER | Turing | 2176 | 1470/1650 | 8GB GDDR6 | 14Gbps |
| NVIDIA RTX 2060 FE | Turing | 1904 | 1365/168 | 6GB GDDR6 | 14Gbps |
| ZOTAC Gaming GTX 1660 | Turing | 1408 | 1530/1785 | 6GB GDDR5 | 8Gbps |
| ZOTAC GTX 1650 SUPER | Turing | 1280 | 1530/1725 | 4GB GDDR6 | 12Gbps |
| NVIDIA GTX 1080 FE | Pascal | 2560 | 1607/1733 | 8GB GDDR5X | 10Gbps |
| NVIDIA GTX 1070 FE | Pascal | 1920 | 1506/1683 | 8GB GDDR5 | 8Gbps |
| NVIDIA GTX 1060 FE 6GB | Pascal | 1280 | 1506/1708 | 6GB GDDR5 | 8Gbps |
| AMD Radeon RX 5700XT | Navi 10 | 2560 | 1605/1755/1905 | 8GB GDDR6 | 14Gbps |
| AMD Radeon RX 5700 | Navi 10 | 2304 | 1465/1625/1725 | 8GB GDDR6 | 14Gbps |
| Sapphire RX 5600 XT | Navi 10 | 2304 | 1130/1660/1750 | 6GB GDDR6 | 14Gbps |
| AMD RX Vega 64 | Vega 10 | 4096 | 1247/1546 | 8GB HBM2 | 945Mbps |
| AMD RX Vega 56 | Vega 10 | 3584 | 1156/1471 | 8GB HBM2 | 800Mbs |
| Sapphire RX 5500 XT 4GB | Navi 14 | 1408 | 1737/1845 | 4GB GDDR6 | 14Gbps |
| MSI RX 580 Armor 8GB | Polaris 20 | 2304 | 1366 | 8GB GDDR5 | 8Gbps |
| Sapphire Nitro + RX 570 4GB | Polaris 20 | 2048 | 1340 | 4GB GDDR5 | 7Gbps |
Drivers used
| Drivers | |
|---|---|
| Radeon settings | 20.8.1 |
| GeForce | 451.67 |
Preselected Scaling At 4K
Testing presets at 4K gives us some quick metrics before you dive too deep into the game. First off, it shows us how the game looks on different presets, and how performance scales with those settings. If anything is obvious here, this game is as crazy in detail. That’s a good thing, because you can see the performance scales too.
Just about every graphics card on the market will perform a bit of fighting from this game over 60 FPS at its intended resolution with the Ultra preset option enabled. But, turn it down to High and you will practically double your performance and you really will not miss much. Grass detail is truly (forgive me here) the Achillies Heel of the performance of this game. If you can comfortably reject this setting, I would go as low as you are willing to put back some precious performance.
Low Preset
Average preset
Hege preset
Ultra preset
Ryzen 3000 CPU fast control
While this test does not tell exactly how many cores and threads the game can and will use, it does show how the game performs as you move up in cores and threads available from the Ryzen 5 3600 series to the Ryzen 9 3900 series. series. These were tested at 1080p Low settings, unlike how we tested the rest of the results while pairing the CPU with the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition. Just to repeat, this is just to show an example of whether there is an inherent benefit from going from the single chiplet 6 core Zen 2 based parts to the dual chiplet 12 core Zen 2 based parts.
Graphics card results
1080p
Ultrawide 1080p
1440p
Ultrawide 1440p
UHD 4K
Conclusion
From the appearance of the results, it seems that Total War Saga: Troy has declared war on hardware. But seriously, the performance of this very ridiculous. Just do not expect the Ultra settings to be a jaw-dropping one and honestly it does not do much here to justify going to this setting unless you are a graphic snob and transfer your panel anyway.
The performance was just as expected over the graphics cards, because the engine is older and stable, there was not much reason for the GPU vendors to worry about a one-day driver. Unlike recent launches, there were no weird anomalies that would require deeper research on who, what, when, where and how. To be honest, this one was boring to dig through beyond the crushing weight of Ultra.
The biggest downside of the engine still on DirectX 11 is that multithreading performance just isn’t what it can be. You see in performance spread between the 6 Core Zen 2 parts are just a hair behind the 12 Core Zen 2 parts to the point where it is almost within the margin of error for performance readings. Maybe in the future we’ll drop down to the 720p region to see if that makes a difference, but will still include 1080p to show the delta if it exists or not.
If you’ve kept track of or played Total War: Three Kingdoms, you already know what to expect on the performance front. If you have the game for free, I have a hard time imagining that you have problems running the game at decent framerates over any modern hardware solution, even integrated with the lowest settings and modest resolution. But, if you quit and now have to buy the game, you at least know that it will run well.
