Total War Saga: Troy is the latest entry to 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 have remained true at their heart very much a well crafted RTS, and in the current times, that's very welcome. If you're wondering why Chris thought this game was worthy of a 9/10 head over to his review. But, if you're here then you're likely wondering how the game performs.

Total War Saga: Troy has been fairly well-received after being given away for the first 24 hours of its release window over on 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 powering the last Total War entry, Three Kingdoms. Total War dabbled with DirectX 12 back during the latest Warhammer series but have since gone back to a DirectX 11 exclusive for their rendering API, disappointing for a game that can have so many characters on screen.

Testing Methodology

Total War Saga: Troy comes with the typical array of presets ranging from Low to Ultra with even more settings to tweak over the Ultra setting for those crazy enough to endeavor there. Thankfully the game features a repeatable built-in benchmarking utility that gives you the chance to test out the game's performance across three different scenarios. Ultra preset is the name of the game here in this test as we wanted to really put the screws to everything and see if this game could be run at the Ultra preset and we found it to be much harder than expected. We chose to go with the Battle scene as it was the absolute most strenuous of the three and is representative of a scenario where your framerate stability would matter most, the heat of battle. We ran the 90-second benchmark three times capturing results using FrameView.

Just a note, the Battle benchmark included in the game (the one we used) will yield the lowest performance numbers, typically about 60% fo the performance figures the other two benchmarks yield. So if you find yourself with much higher performance comparatively, check which benchmark you're running.

Once we had the results from 3 runs, after discarding an initial burner run for loading purposes, we took the average of average frame rates as well as the 1% percentile results from the run. We report our performance metrics as average frames per second and have moved away from the 1% and .1% reporting and are now using the 1% percentile. For those uncertain of what the 1% percentile is, representing is easily explained as showing only 1 frame out of 100 is slower than this frame rate. Put another way, 99% of the frames will achieve at least this frame rate.

Ultra Preset Settings

Test System