A Total War Saga: Troy PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide

CPU Performance – Core Scaling and Ryzen Oddities

As we mentioned on Page 3, our hypothesis is that A Total War Saga: Troy is based on Total War Warhammer II’s version of Creative Assembly’s Total War engine, given the game’s lack of support for features within Total War Three Kingdoms. As such, it is possible that A Total War Saga: Troy could be more hardware efficient, had it used a newer version of Creative Assembly’s engine.

Regardless, the nature of Total War Saga titles prevents Creative Assembly from completing major engine reworks. As such, the game shouldn’t be expected to make perfect use of ultra-high core count processors. 

With our Ryzen 9 3950X, we found that A Total War Saga: Troy didn’t make good use of more than six cores and Twelve threads in the game’s battle sections. If anything, performance declined as core counts rose further. While the game kept moving work through all 16 cores of our Ryzen 9 3950X processor, the game didn’t benefit from these additional cores. That said, moving from four cores to six cores delivered significant performance gains. 

  

Ryzen oddities? 

For our Battle CPU tests, we measured performance using the game’s Ultra preset with both Extreme and Large unit sizes. With Large Unit sizes, performance declines with more than six cores decrease, making performance practically identical with higher core count processors. 

Strangely, disabling SMT on our quad-core configuration resulted in a huge performance decrease for our Ryzen 9 3950X. This performance decrease was repeatable, but not as significant within A Total War Saga: Troy’s campaign mode. Perhaps this is a reason why no Zen 2 Ryzen 3000 processor lacks SMT, or perhaps disabling this many cores on our Ryzen 9 3950X creates other issues, be it too much inter-CCX communication or some other issue. 

With A Total War Saga: Troy, our recommendation is that players use quad-core processors with SMT/Hyperthreading enabled, thought he game is best played with six-core processors. Perhaps future Total War games will benefit from higher core counts, as the engine needs to implement DirectX 12 or Vulkan support someday. 

  
The Campaign Map

A Total War Saga: Troy’s Campaign Map is primarily single-thread limited, offering 60 FPS performance in our test runs on CPUs with as little as two cores. End turn times will be faster on systems with more cores/threads, though the game isn’t able to utilise the Ryzen 9 3950X’s full core count in this part of the game. 

Like the game’s Battle mode, A Total War Saga: Troy only benefits from increases to core/thread count up to six cores and twelve threads. After this, no real benefits are visible. Strangely, moving to 12 and 16 cores results in performance degradation, possible due to AMD’s use of two separate CPU dies, which can add more latency into the mix. 

What seems clear here is that Creative Assembly’s Total War engine could be a little more Ryzen-aware. Perhaps Ryzen optimisations will arrive with future game patches, or the release of Zen 3 processors will reduce the impact of these architectural traits.