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Total War: Three Kingdoms PC Performance Review

Settings and Options - Resolution Scale and what's beyond Ultra

Published: 26th May 2019 | Source: OC3D Internal Testing | Price: | Author: Mark Campbell

Settings and Options - Resolution Scale and what's beyond Ultra

In many ways, Three Kingdoms is much like the Total War: Warhammer series of games, at least in terms of graphics tech. Upon loading the game, we are greeted with four basic quality options, Low, Medium, High and Ultra, alongside options such as Resolution and Resolution Scale options as well as dedicated Gamma and Brightness sliders. 

Resolution Scaling is a great feature in the Total War franchise which renders the game's UI at your chosen native resolution while allowing the game to run at a lower internal resolution for 3D elements. This means that a 4K resolution can be used for Three Kingdoms' UI while a lower resolution buffer is used to render the title's 3D graphics, which is great for PC users who don't own an ultra-high-end system. These options can also be incredibly useful to laptop users, especially those who lack discrete graphics solutions. 

Moving on, we find ourselves a larger list of advanced graphical options, which includes Three Kingdom's newly added TAA option, which has never been included in a Total War game before. This option hopes to address the series' aliasing issues, without relying on performance heavy solutions like TAA. 
  

Below are the graphical settings that each of Three Kingdoms' presets target, though it is worth noting that several options move beyond Creative Assembly's Ultra preset, with Unit Size settings having two options that are larger than large. Screen Space Reflections are also disabled within each preset. 

Total War: Three Kingdoms is a demanding game, but at least Creative Assembly has included these options for those who want to stress test their high-end systems or better utilise the performance levels that are offered by future generations of CPUs and graphics cards.   

Setting Beyond Ultra

Screen Space Reflections and Ultra and Extreme Unit Size settings are not activated in any of Total War: Three Kingdom's default presets. That said, these options are extremely demanding, and should only be considered on extremely high-end systems. 

Most Recent Comments

26-05-2019, 13:57:17

NeverBackDown

Fantastic write up Mark

I too did some limited testing and let me tell you the performance is certainly better than Warhammer 2, but man some settings are insane!

TAA in my testing easily eats up 11-12 FPS. Shadows also are extremely demanding, basically everything that was extremely demanding before still is. Though the major improvement to CPU performance is definitely helping make it a more consistent and better gameplay experience.

It looks like I'll dial down every setting except unit sizes to high. Not much benefit using more based off the screenshots.

I also would like to see separate settings for campaign and battle. They can be so much different in terms of framerates it's makes you have to take into account both modes and dial back settings.Quote

26-05-2019, 18:50:16

WYP

Quote:

Originally Posted by NeverBackDown Fantastic write up Mark I too did some limited testing and let me tell you the performance is certainly better than Warhammer 2, but man some settings are insane! TAA in my testing easily eats up 11-12 FPS. Shadows also are extremely demanding, basically everything that was extremely demanding before still is. Though the major improvement to CPU performance is definitely helping make it a more consistent and better gameplay experience. It looks like I'll dial down every setting except unit sizes to high. Not much benefit using more based off the screenshots. I also would like to see separate settings for campaign and battle. They can be so much different in terms of framerates it's makes you have to take into account both modes and dial back settings.

Thanks. Yeah, there are lot of complexities to the Total War series.

This game definitely runs better than Warhammer II, that said, the extra unit variety and the unit sizes that some factions offer do not do that game any favours. The Skaven will kill your CPU cycles faster than any of those dwarf things.

While TAA can be demanding, it is a great addition to the game. It deals with a lot of the aliasing and smooths over a lot of the fuzziness that the game has with FXAA or no AA. As nice as MSAA sounds on paper, it is more demanding and doesn't address all types of aliasing.

I'd love to have that 5GHz i9-9900KS right now...Quote

26-05-2019, 20:39:06

NeverBackDown

Playing at 1440p it reduces the need for TAA but it still does look slightly better. But with my 1080 just maintaing 60fps is enough of a task. Adding TAA drops me to the 45-50 range. So i'll stick with no TAA.

I use extreme unit settings to, which is also another reason TAA is such a big performance hit since it has to calculate for all the extra units.Quote

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