Introduction
Published: 17th August 2020 | Source: OC3D Internal Testing | Price: | Author: Mark Campbell
Introduction
All Total War games are effectively two games in one, an empire management game and a real-time tactics experience. Players need to excel at both to succeed, as no nation can survive without competent commanders, and a failing country cannot maintain a strong army.
The Total War Saga series is Creative Assembly's attempt at making a smaller scale Total War experience. These games cover a relatively small period of history and takes place across a relatively small campaign map; but what the Saga series loses in scale it gains with more focused narratives and a deeper focus on the pivotal nature of some global events.
A Total War Saga: Troy focuses on the Trojan War, the legendary war which was waged between the city of Troy and Greek forces. The war is a major part of Greek mythology, allowing this Total War title to gain a mythic twist with hero units and mythological combatants.
The purpose of this analysis is to provide PC gamers with some optimisation tips for Total War Saga: Troy and to see how the game runs on today's PC hardware. Will this Total War utilise highly-threaded CPUs? Has Troy benefited from any engine upgrades over Total War Warhammer II or Total War: Three Kingdoms? Let's find out.
Contents
- PC System Requirements & Graphics Options - An offshoot of Warhammer?
- Graphical Settings Comparisons - Battle
- Graphical Settings Comparisons - Campaign Map
- CPU Performance - How Core-Hungry is A Total War Saga: Troy?
- Unit Size Scaling - Does larger units have a huge performance impact?
- Optimisation Tips - All Settings Tested - How to get higher framerates
- Presets Performance - Performance Scaling - Navi VS Turing - RX 5700 VS RTX 2060
- 1080p Campaign and Battle Performance
- 1440p Campaign and Battle Performance
- 4K Campaign and Battle Performance
- Conclusion
GPU drivers
When testing A Total War Saga: Troy, we opted to use the newest drivers from both the Radeon and Geforce camps. These drivers are AMD's Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 20.8.1 driver as well as Nvidia's Geforce 451.67 WHQL driver.
Testing Methodology - Our New Test System
A Total War Saga: Troy is the first game to utilise OC3D's new games test system. We plan to detail this system further at a later date and explain our hardware selections in detail.
For now, we will say that we can see many future PC games utilising larger core/thread counts and requiring SSD storage. This system will allow us to provide more detailed core scaling tests and provide us with a strong baseline for storage-based performance testing; which can span from 3.5-inch SATA-based mechanical storage drives to PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSDs.
You can expect to hear more about this system in a future article, where we will detail the construction of this system and compare it to our previous games testing system.
OC3D Game/GPU Test Rig
AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Processpr
ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Formula (X570) Motherboard
Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB Series DDR4 3600MHz (2x8GB) Memory
Corsair RM1000i Power Supply
Corsair iCUE H150i RGB Pro XT All-in-One Liquid CPU Cooler
Corsair MP600 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD
Corsiar Obsidian 500D RGB SE Case
Windows 10 x64 "May 2020" Update
GPU Selection
No gaming test suite would be complete without a large selection of GPUs. At OC3D our current test suite covers Nvidia's RTX 20-series and GTX 10-series GPUs alongside AMD's RDNA, RX Vega and RX 500 series graphics cards.
Radeon RX 5700 Series - Navi (RDNA)
- Powercolor Radeon RX 5700 XT Red Devil
- Powercolor Radeon RX 5700 Red Devil
Geforce RTX 20-Series & GTX 16-Series
- Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition
- Nvidia RTX 2060 Founders Edition
- Palit GTX 1660 Super StormX
Geforce GTX 10-series
- Nvidia GTX 1070 Founders Edition
- ASUS GTX 1060 Strix Gaming OC
AMD RX Vega Series
- AMD RX Vega 56
AMD RX 500 Series
- AMD RX 580 Strix OC