Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia PC Performance Review

Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia PC Performance Review

Introduction 

Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia is not your average Total War game, focusing on a specific moment in history where things can change rapidly. This game is not Medieval III: Total War, but a tightly focused experience based in the time when a United Anglo Saxon Kingdom was first established, and England emerged as a nation. 
 
With a tighter focus on the lifetime of King Alfred the Great, several aspects of the game like unit recruitment and technology research have changed significantly, with minor settlements offering very different roles. Thrones of Britannia is not your average Total War game, explaining why this title has divided the series’ fanbase so much. 

Technologically speaking Thrones of Britannia is a regression from what we have seen with Total War: Warhammer, with this title making use of an updated version of Total War: Attila’s engine, which means that some technological progress has been lost. The main problem with this choice is that Total War: Attila’s engine is 32-bit and does not contain all of the same optimisations that have come to more recent game’s like Total War: Warhammer. 

Creative Assembly’s Engine choice does make a lot of sense, as Thrones of Britannia does not make use of the Magic System and multiple races used in Total War: Warhammer, making a lot of the engine redundant while requiring a lot more reworking to create a new Medieval combat sim. 

The question that remains here is whether or not this regression has major performance/visual consequences and how well PC gamers can expect this title to run on their systems. Will the lack of magic orcs and dragons make Thrones of Britannia easy to run, or will this engine regression make running the game a chore?  

Drivers

Both AMD and Nvidia have decided against releasing day-0 drivers for Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia, which means that will be using Radeon Software Adrenalin version 18.4.1 and Nvidia’s Geforce 397.31 drivers.  

It is possible that both AMD and Nvidia will be able to offer increased performance in the future with newer graphics card drivers, though it seems unlikely that either manufacturer will focus on this game.Â