Total War: Three Kingdoms PC Systems Specs – New Tech and Dropped Multi-GPU support

Total War: Three Kingdoms PC Systems Specs - New Tech and Dropped Multi-GPU support

Total War: Three Kingdoms PC Systems Specs – New Tech and Dropped Multi-GPU support

Creative Assembly has released Total War: Three Kingdoms’ PC system requirements, detailing some new features that have arrived in the game as well as older features that have been dropped from the game. MSAA is out, and TAA has now been added to the title, promising better results visually and a lower graphical impact than MSAA.     

The addition of TAA has created what many will consider as a technical downgrade for Total War: Three Kingdoms, as TAA is technically incompatible with SLI and Crossfire, with the developer releasing the following statement regarding the game’s lack of GPU support. 

    While MSAA works by sampling each single frame multiple times (super-intensive for the GPU) and taking the average in order to smooth out jaggies, TAA works by ‘looking back in time’ – it grabs the frames that have already been displayed and are still sat in your GPU’s memory buffer. It then works out the average to display in the current frame. It requires a fraction of your GPU’s resources compared to MSAA, and can reduce noise and jitter, leading to better results. In short, TAA looks better, and gives us a notably higher framerate, than MSAA.

However, TAA doesn’t work with traditional Crossfire and SLI, which rely on AFR/AFR2 (alternative frame rendering) techniques. TAA and AFR are, quite simply, incompatible. AFR doesn’t allow any dependency between frames, which TAA obviously requires as it references previously-displayed frames.

Also, getting SLI and Crossfire support into the game (and therefore requiring the player to use other, more costly forms of AA, which would be somewhat self-defeating) is not as simple as turning it on. It needs re-implementing from where we left it in the WARHAMMER games, and that implementation would be non-trivial.

 
At this time Creative Assembly is exploring other options for Multi-GPU support in Total War: Three Kingdoms, but at this time they have not committed to adding the feature. 

With Total War: Three Kingdoms’ dual nature, exploring both the historical and romanticised version of the Three Kingdoms period, the game will feature two colour palette options, offering both rich and vibrant colour in Romance mode and lighter, more realistic colour in Records/classic mode. Updates to the game’s Bokeh Depth of Field, in-game materials and shadows will also be present within the game, as well as screen-space reflections. 

Like all Total War games, Three Kingdoms is also designed to scale across a variety of system configurations, from notebooks with Integrated graphics to high-end gaming systems. 

Total War: Three Kingdoms PC Systems Specs - New Tech and Dropped Multi-GPU support  

Below are the full PC system requirements for Total War: Three Kingdoms, which were created based on internal benchmark numbers from Creative Assembly and are designed to act as guidelines for PC players. These specifications are subject to change, as performance optimisations are still ongoing.

At this time, Total War Three Kingdoms is expected to support both DirectX 12 and DirectX 11.  

PC Minimum Specifications (Integrated)

Expected around 25-35 FPS on the campaign map and in a 1v1, 21 units vs 21 units battle, default graphics preset set to “Low”, running at 1280×720
Operating System: Windows 7 64 Bit
Processor: i7-8550U 1.80GHz
RAM: 6GB
Video Card: Intel UHD Graphics 620

PC Minimum Specifications (Discrete)

Expected around 25-35 FPS on the campaign map and in a 1v1, 21 units vs 21 units battle, default graphics preset set to “Low”, running at 1280×720
Operating System: Windows 7 64 Bit
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 3.00Ghz
RAM: 4GB
Video Card: GTX 650 Ti | HD 7850 1GB VRAM

PC Recommended Specifications

Expected around 45-55 FPS on the campaign map and in a 1v1, 21 units vs 21 units battle, default graphics preset set to “High”, running at 1920×1080
Operating System: Windows 10 64 Bit
Processor: Intel i5-6600 | Ryzen 5 2600X
RAM: 8GB
Video Card: GTX 970 | R9 Fury X 4GB VRAM

PC 60 FPS Specifications

Expect 60 FPS on the campaign map and in a 1v1, 21 units vs 21 units battle, default graphics preset set to “Ultra”, running at 1920×1080
Operating System: Windows 10 64 Bit
Processor: Intel® Core™ Intel i7-8700K
RAM: 8GB
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060

Please note: all systems perform differently. The framerates stated are based on benchmarks we’ve taken on PCs using the quoted specs, with fresh OS installs, no major background programs running, and should be taken as a guide rather than an absolute.

Total War Three Kingdoms will release on May 23rd 2019. 

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