Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia PC Performance Review

The next Total War – What has to change  

Graphical Settings

If there is one thing that Creative Assembly should take away from Thrones of Britannia, it is that future Total War games need to have separate graphical options menus for the game’s campaign mode and real-time battle sequences. 

All too often we found that having stable performance in one didn’t mean having steady performance in the other, creating situations where we had to make visual/graphical sacrifices in one to serve the other. Offering the option for unique graphical settings for each mode can provide gamers with the best of both worlds, allowing players to have the highest levels of graphical fidelity and performance in both the game’s campaign and battle modes.  

What we would also like to see is more detailed labels for each of the game’s graphical settings, detailing how each option affect CPU, GPU and memory performance. This adjustment would make it much easier for gamers to optimise the game’s performance. 

CPU Utilisation

If there is another thing to take from Thrones of Britannia, it is that The Attila engine used within the title is in dire need of some additional multi-threading support. While some of the games performance problems may be due to Thrones of Britannia operating as a 32-bit application, it is hard to see why such issues are present where a better version of the Warscape engine exists in Total War Warhammer. 

While CPU performance has traditionally been a weakness for Total War titles, there is no excuse anymore this type of issue to be so prevalent in Thrones of Britannia. In Total War: Warhammer II we can see Skaven hordes with units up to 200 rats strong slam into Elven lines as Dragon and Magic also roam the map. If this kind of variety and action is available with relative stability in Total War Warhammer II, there is no excuse for Thrones of Britania having harsher CPU issues given its lower unit sizes and relatively limited amounts of unit variation. 

We know that many of these issues are caused by Thrones of Britannia’s use of a modified version of Creative Assembly’s Total War Attila engine, though that does little to satisfy the users whose systems are CPU limited when they have six plus cores at 4GHz.  

We sincerely hope that future Total War games are not so CPU limited on both the campaign map and the battlefield, as most PC gamers cannot afford to purchase Intel’s latest i7 and overclock it to 5+GHz.